Is That Your Dragon?

The first episode chronicled the quest of a guy named Martin, who was trying to get to his fiancée.  The backdrop is a future Earth that has been devastated by the Apocalypse, and in this episode you get to find out how the emperor of this dystopian future came into power.  More appropriately, you get to play the someday emperor Greg as he takes the final journey that leads to his rise in power.  Aboard a train to India you’ll discover mystery, betrayal and the love of someone’s life… plus some other interesting loose ends from episode one.  You don’t need to have played the first part to enjoy this one, but it certainly can’t hurt.

Like a typical adventure game you’ll need to study all of your locations, scrutinize everyone you meet, and solve some puzzles in order to accomplish your goals.  Most items are collected by tapping on them, though some might be given to you by other characters in the game.  To use an item you tap on it in inventory and then tap what you want to use it with.  As long as your inventory is open, the last item you selected is “active” until you tap on it again or tap on a different item.  To talk to someone just tap on them.  You can then tap to scroll through the dialog.  Also, tapping on certain areas will cause a dialog to come up describing the area.  Just tap away from the dialog to close it.

My Father Is Dead

Unlike the first game, there are no “extended” screens in episode 2, so you don’t have a virtual joystick to scroll around the screen.  That’s okay, because that system had a couple of kinks anyway.  Unfortunately, the navigation in this episode has what I call “sticky” syndrome.  If you click things to quickly, it’s possible for dialogs (or even descriptions when you pick up items) to get stuck.  The only way to clear this is to move to a different scene in the game or sometimes even two or three scenes away.  This wouldn’t be so bad except that every scene has a slight load time, and even slight load times add up after a while.  Patience will persevere, but in the mean time it can get frustrating.

The graphics are decent, and certainly better than episode 1.  The locations look nice, and for the most part the people look good, but there are times when they feel like cardboard cutouts.  There isn’t a ton of animation in the game, the most notable exception being the motion outside the windows to give the train a feeling of movement.  There are some sound effects here and there, though sadly no voiceovers.  That’s something I’d really like to see in this series.  The music is very nice and changes depending on the situation, which is nice because given that the majority of the game takes place in the train it could have been easy to stick with one track.

Mysterious Prelude

As original adventures on the iPhone go, The Train is turning out to be one of the most engaging series available.  The story is well thought out, the pacing is decent, and the developer sure knows how to create a cliffhanger.  The visuals are getting better with each iteration, and the music is blossoming as well.  My main frustration is that the interface actually seems to have gotten a bit worse.  I imagine a lot of it can be attributed to the development tool, but that doesn’t help us as end users out any.  Purely from a story and puzzle standpoint I’d recommend the game, but unless you mind a lot of needless backtracking you’ll soon grow tired of the fragile interface.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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Level 2-2

To guide the sheep you tilt your device left and right.  This actually works pretty smoothly for the most part, though control did feel a bit jittery on a couple of levels.  The problem is that the wolf moves right along with you, so you have to use elements in your surroundings to put some distance between you and the wolf.  Walls can keep one or the other of you from moving, while fans can slow your ascent / decent and springs can catapult you back upwards for a bit.  Ultimately, though, you need to make sure the wolf ends up falling in some water or getting skewered on the wrong end of a spike pit, because otherwise it will eat you in the end.  To move on to the next level you simply must survive the wolf.  To unlock a new level set you must collect a certain number of apples, three of which exist on each level.  The concept is simple enough, but some of these levels are extremely difficult.  On the plus side, you can always revisit a passed level to try and do better later.

Aesthetically, this game is all about cute.  The sheep is extremely adorable with its big eyes and little hearts floating from its head after beating a level.  The wolf is constantly eyeing its prey, and it’s actually kind of amusing when he eats the sheep (not that I don’t feel sorry for the sheep, mind you).  The accompanying sound effects fit the mood of the game perfectly, whether it’s the snicker of the wolf when he gets an apple before you do or the sheep’s laugh.  The music is well done, and each level set has its own theme.

Level 1-14

Currently there are 60 levels broken into 3 worlds, and even though you might be able to finish each level relatively easily, you’ll have to work hard to get all the apples.  There are also 38 achievements to earn, so the game should keep you busy for quite a while.  Personally, I think it’s a while worth spending.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Two For One

The premise is simple – the poor little piggies just want to get from one side of the swamp to the other without becoming croc food, and it’s your job to get them there.  To do this you control a trampoline at the bottom of the screen by sliding it back and forth with your finger.  A pig must be safely nestled on the dock at the right side of the screen in order to be counted.  You have to keep an eye on this, because it’s not uncommon for a pig to just miss a jump at the end of its journey and end up plummeting to an implied doom.  Of course this can also get you into trouble (or at least it does me) because at the last moment I’ll whip over to rescue said pig and lose one coming from the other side of the swamp.

The first level is pretty easy, with a decent sized island floating between the two docks that can give wayward pigs and your poor trampoline a bit of a reprieve.  In the second level the island is moving back and forth, and I believe it’s a bit smaller.  Finally, level 3 gets rid of the island and zooms out a bit, giving you a wider gap to contend with.  I hope they roll out more levels, because I’m eager to see what will be coming next.  Every level sports the hungry crocodile, though he’s really just there for intimidation since you never see him eat any pigs.

Quick While He's Distracted

As you’re playing wings, a clock and a trampoline will occasionally fall from the sky.  The wings will remain with you and save one pig from plummeting to their demise.  The trampoline temporarily makes your trampoline bigger, and the clock slows down all the action for a bit.  The power ups are pretty easy to retrieve (you simply tap on them), the down side being there is no multi-touch, so you have to let go of the trampoline for a moment.  Unfortunately, in this game a moment can make all the difference.

All together there are 3 levels and 5 or 6 different pigs, most of which need to be unlocked by playing the game and some of which aren’t even available to be unlocked unless you make an IAP for the full version.  The game does have a leaderboard for each level via OpenFeint, but sadly there are no achievements at this point.  Hopefully that will come some day.  In the mean time you can feel some sense of accomplishment by rescuing enough pigs to unlock each new level and pig type.

Help!

The visuals are cute.  Each pig has their own look about them, though they do all share a certain sports ball like roundness.  The crocodile pops up every once in a while with a big smile across its mouth, licking its lips.  The only disappointment is that there is no animation in the background.  The sound effects are done well enough, with each pig having a unique grunt.  There is actually a different soundtrack for each level which is nice, and the first level even has some nifty ambient noise.

Crocodile Crossing is another fine casual game from the folks over at Crawl Space Games.  It has the perfect appeal for kids, yet it’s still fun enough for adults to enjoy, even if you don’t have any rugrats.  You can pick up the game for free, but I would definitely encourage you to get the IAP pack, because that has the best levels and pigs in it.  This is one group of pigs that deserve all the help you can give them.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Anyway, when I saw that Mobile Cloth was looking for people to try out and review their cloths, I figured I might as well give it a try.  Certainly whatever they had to offer must be better than my “weapons” of choice.  The difference, however, was incredible.  A couple of swipes with the MC nano (the smaller size cloth), and the screen protector looked just like it did when I first applied it to my device.  The best part is that all you need is the cloth, though they do suggest a bit of water if you have “caked on particles”.  Thankfully that doesn’t usually apply to me, as I’m the only one that uses my iPod Touch.

The cloths come in two sizes: 4”x4” and 9”x9”.  Obviously you can use either size cloth for any size device, though the 4×4 is a bit more portable.  What I like about the smaller size is that it fits quite nicely in the bottom half of the plastic case which came with my iPod Touch and which I still use to carry my device around.  Of course either size can be easily tucked away in a carrying case, and the larger size might be better for a laptop or desktop screen to clear off dust.  You can easily wash and dry the cloths so that they will last for years to come.

The cloths can be bought in packs of 1, 2, 4 and 6, and with the packs of 4 or 6 you get an extra one for free.  If you use your mobile device a lot or have a lot of mobile devices you use (these would even work well with camera lenses, photographers), I would definitely suggest giving a Mobile Cloth a try.  They would make great Christmas gifts as well!

Web Site: Mobile Cloth

I apologize for lack of screen shots, but I’m not really set up for that, and all the shots I tried to take had too much glare to be useful.  Check out the press section of the web site for some links with shots, or visit the “What Is Mobile Cloth” section for a decent video showing the cloths in action.

Is He Dead?

You play a journalist that has taken interest in the musings of an explorer touting the existence of a mysterious breed of “white birds” that is constantly in flight.  When the explorer dies, you find yourself on a quest to return his prize position, an egg that supposedly contains one of these white birds, to the Amerzone.  In part one of this three part tale you’ll rummage through the explorer’s lighthouse and eventually make your way to a craft that will get you to the Amerzone.  The craft launches and… game over.  I would be surprised if the game even took half an hour, and that includes me starting over at one point.

There are two encounters during this installment of the game, but most of your background will come from reading documents you pick up along the way.  I certainly don’t mind reading the occasional letter or journal entry, but I much prefer interaction with NPCs as my prime conduit for learning about my adventure.  This episode is also woefully light on puzzle solving.  There are really only a couple of small “brain teasers”, and most everything else is a matter of wandering around and throwing the occasional switch.  The overall feeling is very “adventure lite” compared to the Syberia series.

Da Plane, Da Plane

Navigation is a matter of dragging your finger to pan around the area (you pretty much have 360 degree vision), and tapping when you want to move or interact with something.  To use an inventory item you select it from the inventory screen, and then it becomes the active item, so you just have to tap whatever you want to use it with.  If you elect the “permanent help” option all pathways and interactive spots will marked, otherwise they won’t.  I’d suggest turning this feature off for more of a challenge, but it makes it almost impossible to determine where to move without directional arrows.  Plus, without the help on I was unable to pick up the first object I ran across that I should have been able to grab.

Graphically the game doesn’t disappoint.  All the areas you navigate through are incredibly detailed and extremely well drawn.  The character models aren’t great, but they look pretty decent.  My one gripe is that some areas are too dark, even with the lights “on”.  The sound effects are spot on and make you feel like you’re in a real place.  When you stand right outside the lighthouse, for example, the rolling waves almost make you physically look up for the nearest seagull.  There are a couple of spots where music plays, but for the most part your audio experience lies with the sound effects.  This isn’t always bad, but some subtle background tunes would be nice.

Enter If You Dare

I realize this is only the first part of three, so maybe I’m judging too harshly, but it really didn’t meet my expectations in any way except visually.  The episode was too short, it didn’t stand well on its own, and there wasn’t a lot to do.  After I realized that I had finished part 1, I almost felt like I didn’t really care to know whether your character gets the egg to the Amerzone safely or even if these white birds really do exists.  Maybe as part of the whole package this is a fine segment, but since I haven’t played episodes 2 and 3 yet I can only offer advice based on this installment.  As such…

Final Verdict
Standalone: Not Recommended
As Part Of The Whole: On The Fence (until I’ve played parts 2&3)

And just so you don’t think I’m being unfair, here’s a perfect counterexample: Path Of The Dragon part 1 was not only good on it’s own, but it actually left me wanting to know what was going to come next.  You can check out my thoughts on that game here: Path Of The Dragon Review

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A-Maze-ing

Each level has a ball at the top of the screen that must be dropped into a basket somewhere else on the board.  The position of the ball and basket will be different on each level, and occasionally you might even get to move the basket around the playing board.  More importantly is the fact that you must slide all the pieces into place so that the dropped ball can bounce, teleport or whatever it needs to in order to get to the basket.  So what are these pieces?

They start with simple wooden parts that might be horizontal, vertical or diagonal boards, or possibly even triangular pieces.  Then you get similar pieces that are wrapped in cloth so they provide a softer bounce.  Springs provide a stronger, quicker bounce.  Fans blow the ball or cause it to float, depending on whether they are horizontal or vertical.  Teleports allow the ball to move from one spot to another without hesitation.  There may be other objects as well, but that’s for you to discover as you play.

Are You A Fan?

Just like the standard sliding puzzle game, the board is divided into an equal number of squares horizontally and vertically, but one is missing so that you can move all the rest of them around.  To move a piece, simply drag it to an adjacent spot, assuming that spot is open.  One caveat is that every board has at least one piece that can’t be moved.  Another interesting feature is the ability to rotate pieces on certain levels.  Unfortunately there is a specific place on the board where the rotation occurs, so it can be rather costly moving pieces to that spot.  You score appears to be based at least partially on the number of moves you make, so unnecessary trips around the board can be quite detrimental.

You start the board with 10, 20 or 30 balls – this can be changed in the settings.  When you think you have all the pieces in place, press the start button and see if you make the basket.  I also think that your score is based on the number of balls you have left, but nothing in the game confirms either of these suspicions.  If you miss, start rearranging the pieces again.  The nice thing is that you can always base your next try off of your last attempt, so if you were close it might just be a matter of sliding a particular piece up, down, left or right one square.  On the other hand, if you’re playing with 30 balls and you’ve tried 15 combinations that didn’t work, it becomes rather difficult to keep track of that all in your head after a while.  And, should you actually have to start the level over again, your back to square one so to speak.

Simple Physics

The visuals are actually quite polished.  The pieces look good, and everything is animated when appropriate.  The basket even flops around as you slide it across the screen.  The sound effects are pretty subdued, but then there isn’t really a lot of need for effects.  I do like the robotic sound the arm makes when it drops the ball.  There’s decent music when the menu is up, but there’s actually no tune playing during the game itself.  That’s a bit disappointing, as it tends to be more noticeable in slower paced games like this.

I’m still not a huge fan of the sliding puzzle mechanic.  However, when it gets used in a situation like this, it actually becomes an interesting game play tactic.  The levels are well designed, and even when they seem impossible it’s usually just a matter of adjusting the location of a piece or two.  It can sometimes get frustrating playing a level through more than one “game over”, especially when you’re playing with the 30 balls setting, but there’s still a sense of accomplishment when you’ve finished a level.  For those that are patient, this will become an addictive experience.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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All Bones, No Skin

You play a lone soldier in a post-apocalyptic world just trying to survive. In order to do so you’ll have to go up against and defeat one adversary after another. Each opponent gets tougher, and each time you start with a level playing field. You each have the same amount of health to start off, and you both have 0 attack modifier and 0 defense modifier. The match 3 board is where you get your supplies by matching 3 or more of the same item. This is one of those games where instead of sliding tiles back and forth you draw a line through all the tiles you want to match (they must be adjacent). When you’ve made your selection you’ll reap the benefit of whatever tile type you chose, and then it will be your opponent’s turn. If you fall below zero health, the game is over. If your opponent loses you move on to fight another villain with more health.

Items on the board do one of 4 things. Weapons like grenades and axes do direct damage to the opponent’s health. If you have an attack modifier, that value is added to the total damage done by the weapons. Any defense the opponent has goes away first before health is reduced. Things like helmets and camouflage pants increase your defense. Objects like target signs and multiple bullets boost your attack modifier. Finally, food, drink and medical supplies help you regain health. The values of each object can be found in the help screen, and if one of the items in your chain has a x2 modifier the point total for that haul is doubled. Each round has a different set of objects, and in fact if the board needs to be reset because there are no moves, the variety of objects will most likely change.

Is Your Mascara Running?

Even though there are “stats”, you’ll be disappointed if you’re looking for a deep RPG experience. I sometimes forget that myself as I think “boy it would be nice if the game did this or that”. In reality, though, the game has a nice balance of matching and basic combat mechanics that keep it simple without it getting old. The one thing I am a bit disappointed with is the fact that it has OpenFeint integration but no achievements. Leaderboards are nice, but only effective as more people get and play the game consistently. At least achievements give you something to earn on your own.

The visuals in ATF are pretty decent. The creatures and your soldier look really cool, and the objects are all easily discernable, except for a couple of knives that look a bit too similar. There aren’t a lot of effects, but there are nice little touches like blood when someone is injured or a flash of light upon being healed. The only thing that kind of gets on my nerves is the jittering of the box for whichever player has the focus. A nicely outlined box would have sufficed here.

I'm Not Little Miss Muffet!

I like the sound effects, but in some cases they are a bit too generic. For instance, every creature sounds the same when it gets hit. There’s also something really creepy about a skeleton swallowing liquids! On the plus side, at least each of the weapons has a unique sound to it. The music in ATF is really good. I’m not sure it fits the post-apocalyptic mood so much (at least not the in-game music), but it’s easy to listen to and doesn’t get overbearing.

After The Fall Puzzle is a great example of how a game doesn’t have to be revolutionary to still be fun. It’s the matching concept we know and love with a couple of twists, and it doesn’t try to be any game’s clone. The non-fantasy setting is a nice touch, and random boards and creatures make for a new experience every time you play. It might not have all the bells and whistles of its contemporaries, but it’s great for spending a few minutes here and there when you feeling like matching with a little bit more.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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All Bones, No Skin

You play a lone soldier in a post-apocalyptic world just trying to survive.  In order to do so you’ll have to go up against and defeat one adversary after another.  Each opponent gets tougher, and each time you start with a level playing field.  You each have the same amount of health to start off, and you both have 0 attack modifier and 0 defense modifier.  The match 3 board is where you get your supplies by matching 3 or more of the same item.  This is one of those games where instead of sliding tiles back and forth you draw a line through all the tiles you want to match (they must be adjacent).  When you’ve made your selection you’ll reap the benefit of whatever tile type you chose, and then it will be your opponent’s turn.  If you fall below zero health, the game is over.  If your opponent loses you move on to fight another villain with more health.

Items on the board do one of 4 things.  Weapons like grenades and axes do direct damage to the opponent’s health.  If you have an attack modifier, that value is added to the total damage done by the weapons.  Any defense the opponent has goes away first before health is reduced.  Things like helmets and camouflage pants increase your defense.  Objects like target signs and multiple bullets boost your attack modifier.  Finally, food, drink and medical supplies help you regain health.  The values of each object can be found in the help screen, and if one of the items in your chain has a x2 modifier the point total for that haul is doubled.  Each round has a different set of objects, and in fact if the board needs to be reset because there are no moves, the variety of objects will most likely change.

Is Your Mascara Running?

Even though there are “stats”, you’ll be disappointed if you’re looking for a deep RPG experience.  I sometimes forget that myself as I think “boy it would be nice if the game did this or that”.  In reality, though, the game has a nice balance of matching and basic combat mechanics that keep it simple without it getting old.  The one thing I am a bit disappointed with is the fact that it has OpenFeint integration but no achievements.  Leaderboards are nice, but only effective as more people get and play the game consistently.  At least achievements give you something to earn on your own.

The visuals in ATF are pretty decent.  The creatures and your soldier look really cool, and the objects are all easily discernable, except for a couple of knives that look a bit too similar.  There aren’t a lot of effects, but there are nice little touches like blood when someone is injured or a flash of light upon being healed.  The only thing that kind of gets on my nerves is the jittering of the box for whichever player has the focus.  A nicely outlined box would have sufficed here.

I'm Not Little Miss Muffet!

I like the sound effects, but in some cases they are a bit too generic.  For instance, every creature sounds the same when it gets hit.  There’s also something really creepy about a skeleton swallowing liquids!  On the plus side, at least each of the weapons has a unique sound to it.  The music in ATF is really good.  I’m not sure it fits the post-apocalyptic mood so much (at least not the in-game music), but it’s easy to listen to and doesn’t get overbearing.

After The Fall Puzzle is a great example of how a game doesn’t have to be revolutionary to still be fun.  It’s the matching concept we know and love with a couple of twists, and it doesn’t try to be any game’s clone.  The non-fantasy setting is a nice touch, and random boards and creatures make for a new experience every time you play.  It might not have all the bells and whistles of its contemporaries, but it’s great for spending a few minutes here and there when you feeling like matching with a little bit more.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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The Big Bad Man

You are a velocispider – half velociraptor, half spider, with a bit of cyborg power thrown in for good measure.  Apparently your eggs are pretty tasty, because an evil scientist is trying to collect them for his breakfast.  You’ll have to fend off 20 waves of diabolical egg snatchers, including the good doctor himself.  There are a nice variety of creatures to fight, each with their own style of attack.  As for your part in this battle, you tilt the device back and forth to move the velocispider, and press and release the screen to fire a charge shot.  Normal firing is handled automatically.

My favorites are what I like to call the “fail whale wannabe”, the super crab, and of course the doctor, who you get the pleasure of confronting twice.  Besides the doctor, the only other creature that can steal eggs is a purple squid like thing, but you have to keep a constant watch because they’ll sneak up and snatch eggs while you’re busy worrying about something that’s actually shooting at you.  If you lose all three eggs the level is over.  Same goes for losing all three hearts.

Reinforcement Time

Thankfully you get several power ups through the course of a level, including points, hearts, and a couple of nice weapons like double shot, triple shot and speed shot.  And the plus side, power ups carry through to the next level.  On the down side, so does the lack of hearts you might have.  The game has 18 achievements that you can work on, but given that part of the game’s old school charm is its tough nature, many of these will probably be hard to get if you’re a more casual gamer.  In fact, they’re aren’t really any you earn simply for playing the game.  But, that’s pretty good incentive for coming back again and again.

The graphics are retro perfection.  Imagine taking a Nintendo game and giving it a VGA facelift, and that’s the style of the visuals.  The velocispider is awesome, and the villains are pretty cool as well.  As for my favorites, I direct you back to the list above, as they are the same visually as they are game play wise.  The background has a nice “ravaged future” look to it, and the cut scenes remind me of the old Ninja Gaiden NES game.  I have no idea why, but they do.

Fail Whale???

The sound effects are about the only thing I’m disappointed with.  They’re not bad by any means, but they aren’t really fresh like the rest of the aesthetics.  It would be cool if some of the creatures made noises, and I’d really love to hear something from the doctor, even if it was just a maniacal laugh every once in a while.  At least the music has that same “authentic but upgraded” feel as the visuals.  Granted you’ll be too busy dodging bullets to notice for the most part.

Velocispider is old school gaming personified, right down to the single screen playing field.  At the same time it feels fresh and new, without really bringing anything different to the table.  There’s lots of action, splendid visuals, and a great soundtrack to listen to.  I just wish there were some sort of endless mode or something.  That would be icing on this delicious retro cake (okay, so I’m a bit hungry right now).

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
App Store Link
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The Big Bad Man

You are a velocispider – half velociraptor, half spider, with a bit of cyborg power thrown in for good measure.  Apparently your eggs are pretty tasty, because an evil scientist is trying to collect them for his breakfast.  You’ll have to fend off 20 waves of diabolical egg snatchers, including the good doctor himself.  There are a nice variety of creatures to fight, each with their own style of attack.  As for your part in this battle, you tilt the device back and forth to move the velocispider, and press and release the screen to fire a charge shot.  Normal firing is handled automatically.

My favorites are what I like to call the “fail whale wannabe”, the super crab, and of course the doctor, who you get the pleasure of confronting twice.  Besides the doctor, the only other creature that can steal eggs is a purple squid like thing, but you have to keep a constant watch because they’ll sneak up and snatch eggs while you’re busy worrying about something that’s actually shooting at you.  If you lose all three eggs the level is over.  Same goes for losing all three hearts.

Reinforcement Time

Thankfully you get several power ups through the course of a level, including points, hearts, and a couple of nice weapons like double shot, triple shot and speed shot.  And the plus side, power ups carry through to the next level.  On the down side, so does the lack of hearts you might have.  The game has 18 achievements that you can work on, but given that part of the game’s old school charm is its tough nature, many of these will probably be hard to get if you’re a more casual gamer.  In fact, they’re aren’t really any you earn simply for playing the game.  But, that’s pretty good incentive for coming back again and again.

The graphics are retro perfection.  Imagine taking a Nintendo game and giving it a VGA facelift, and that’s the style of the visuals.  The velocispider is awesome, and the villains are pretty cool as well.  As for my favorites, I direct you back to the list above, as they are the same visually as they are game play wise.  The background has a nice “ravaged future” look to it, and the cut scenes remind me of the old Ninja Gaiden NES game.  I have no idea why, but they do.

Fail Whale???

The sound effects are about the only thing I’m disappointed with.  They’re not bad by any means, but they aren’t really fresh like the rest of the aesthetics.  It would be cool if some of the creatures made noises, and I’d really love to hear something from the doctor, even if it was just a maniacal laugh every once in a while.  At least the music has that same “authentic but upgraded” feel as the visuals.  Granted you’ll be too busy dodging bullets to notice for the most part.

Velocispider is old school gaming personified, right down to the single screen playing field.  At the same time it feels fresh and new, without really bringing anything different to the table.  There’s lots of action, splendid visuals, and a great soundtrack to listen to.  I just wish there were some sort of endless mode or something.  That would be icing on this delicious retro cake (okay, so I’m a bit hungry right now).

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
App Store Link
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Two Keys

You are Monty, and it is up to you to traverse 90 levels of dastardly mugwumps, nasty lasers and other things, rescuing all the little Montys and escaping to safety. This task won’t be easy, as Mugwumps love eating Monty for any meal of the day, and if you or the little one gets too close you’re dinner. There’s also a pesky time limit once the escape portal has been opened before the air runs out and you must start again. Every once in a while they even throw in an extra little quirk like the entire level being timed or you only having a certain number of moves to complete a level. I actually wish there were more of the latter type of puzzle, though I could certainly do without any more timing obstacles than I need.

To move Monty you tap him and then drag where you want him to go. Once you lift your finger Monty is off, and he can’t be maneuvered again until he stops. One problem is that if you don’t tap just right then you don’t get hold of Monty, and this can either waste precious time or prevent you from getting out of the way of an enemy quickly enough. Also, it’s hard to be completely precise with this method of movement, which can cause issues when trying to navigate narrow areas. You also have the ability to jump by tapping on Monty, but again if you’re off just a bit he doesn’t jump, and that’s not good when you’re headed towards a laser. Finally there are power ups you can pick up like a speed boost and high jump. You just run over them to collect them, and then you tap on them before your next move to use them.

Flame On

The level designs are interesting. Most every level has a bunch of coins you need to collect before the portal will open. Some levels have doors which require keys to open, others have lasers you need to avoid or jump over. And of course there are the different types of Mugwumps you need to deal with. I’ve only played about a third of the game so far, but I’d imagine (or at least I’m hoping) that there might even be a few more things in store for me. Part of my problem at the beginning was that the level designs seemed pretty ridiculous, but as I continue to play I realize just how good some of them are. There are some that are pretty silly, though with this many levels that’s to be expected. The important thing is that it’s clear the level designer tried to be as diverse as possible when designing the different levels.

The interface could stand to be cleaned up a bit. Level selection is cumbersome to scroll through, and sometimes hard to pick the actual level you want. When you die it should give you the option to retry the level, instead of making you go back to the menu and select it again. A reset at the top of the screen that can be executed at any time during the level would be nice as well.

Wacky Starfish

The graphics are a bit of a mixed bag. Monty looks like a big yellow asterisk with eyes, which is actually kind of cool. The monsters are kind of cheesy, but they still look half way decent, and I love it when their mouths open up to eat Monty. The walls and lasers and stuff look pretty basic, which when combined with the overall interface give the game a bit of an unpolished feel. The sound effects work pretty well. I particularly like the sound of a mugwump eating Monty and the different noises Monty makes in response. The music is nice to listen to, while not really standing out from the pack. At least there is background music and it’s tolerable, though.

Monty is definitely one of those cases where you shouldn’t judge the book by its cover… or more appropriately, the game by its screen shots. The cool part is that you can get a full third of the game for free by downloading The Story Begins, so you can see for yourself what the game is like without spending any money. I think you’ll find that it’s worth an extra buck to get the remaining 60 levels. Monty isn’t my favorite puzzle game in recent months, but it certainly merits spending some time with.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Store Link (free version)

Lightning Strike

The biggest problem I have with part three is that there wasn’t much of a noticeable difference between the original up through this second sequel.  Sure it’s a bit flashier and there are now four playable characters, but when you even compare the growth of this series to its urban counterpart Streets Of Rage, it pales in comparison.  On the plus side, it plays quite nicely on my iPod Touch 4G.  It also looks better than the first two installments, though the color palettes are still atrocious.  At least the character designs are better and more defined.  The music is still the same wonderful chip tunes that permeated the series, and the sound effects are still pretty bad.

Game play is still pretty much the same, though you can actually get health and magic refills during the levels instead of having to wait until the end now.  There are also a couple opportunities where you can pick between two paths, and at least one instance where you’re fighting aboard a moving platform, two features which I believe were new to this iteration of the series.  Still, minor enhancements aside, this game falls more under the concept of “level pack” than an actual new game.  It just goes to show how spoiled we’ve gotten over the years.

Well That Hurt

Part one was fun just for the sake of reminiscing, and part two was enjoyable because it felt like a nice step up from part one (plus the port was much more playable than the first outing).  With this sequel, however, I’d only recommend it to three groups of people: die hard fans, hardcore nostalgia buffs (not necessarily fans of Golden Axe itself), and those that are curious about the series and haven’t tried the others.  Everyone else has probably either had their fill or won’t be interested when you compare it to more recent offerings.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

Bunny In Action

Basically the game is you against the weasels, though there is no intro or any sort of explanation as to why this feud is going on.  You can run left and right, jump, and use a knife or gun to defend yourself against the enemy.  Every action has an onscreen button, and they are all quite responsive.  I do wish the gun and jump buttons were flipped, but that’s a minor quibble.  There are coins to collect that seem to serve no purpose other than collecting them, and a meager 6 Game Center achievements that you can earn.  There are leaderboards as well, but I haven’t really been compelled to check them to see how I’m doing.

The enemies come at you from both sides, but other than two different types of weapons (which don’t seem to serve a functional difference), there is no variety amongst the weasels.  As the weasels attack you the screen will start to flash with bloody red borders.  The more frequent the flash, the more damaged you are.  Visually it’s pretty neat, but as a true life meter it’s worthless, because it doesn’t tell you how many hits until you die.  There are land mines which play nice as long as you don’t land directly on them, and that’s basically it for opposition.  My main cause of death is usually misjudging my jump and landing on a mine instead of going over it.  In the end, there’s just not a whole lot to do in this game.

Strike A Pose

The graphics aren’t bad, especially when it comes to the detailed background, but again there isn’t much variety.  All the weasels look the same except for the weapons, so your character is the main thing that stands out.  Again it’s not bad, but not great.  The one neat effect besides the blood border is the fact that the weasels do drop their weapon when you hit them.  The sound effects are pretty bland, and when you swipe a weasel with your knife it sounds more like you’re tearing paper than anything.  The music is okay, but it gets repetitive really quickly.

While a conclusion is probably overkill at this point, here goes anyway.  The move left or right and attack everything in sight paradigm has been done 100 different ways on the iPhone, and a majority of them are better than this.  I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed that Pocket Monkey Games will rise above their current offerings one of these days, but alas Battle Bunny isn’t their salvation.  I wish there was at least something that would make me say “you might consider this if…”, but that’s not even the case.  If you don’t own any Pocket Monkey Games, get Sparta instead.  Otherwise, you should probably look elsewhere.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

Tapper Pro is a game for iOS. You bounce a variety of balls in an attempt to keep them aloft. It doesn’t do that very well.

I could end my review here, but I’m going to elaborate as much as I possibly can.

Prepare to press the Home button in about 30 seconds.

Gameplay

Tapper Pro, created by developer Weeny Brain’s Game, is…well, I’ll let the developers describe it via their App Store product description:

I’ll let the developers continue:

Total pandemoonium! I'm here all night, folks.

The three different difficulties aren’t exactly varied. I can’t seem to tell any difference between “easy” and “normal” modes, while the only “extreme” mode involved the bouncing eye. This eye moves so fast and is so much smaller that it isn’t even remotely playable. I let my wife have a go at it (she’s usually pretty good at tapping/rhythm games) and she managed to make a second eye appear before nearly pitching my phone through the front door.

Clear Eyes drops, for dry, itchy eyes.

Graphics and sound

Tapper Pro looks and feels like the simple Flash games I’d play in the computer lab in grade nine. There are five playable spheres to usher around the screen from sports balls, to the moon, to an awfully red eye. Each ball is a perfect circle which is unaffected by the MS Paint quality environments. I hoped, for example, that on the basketball court “level” I’d have a chance to toss the ball at the net, or even get points for a swish. No dice. The backgrounds are static and lifeless.

Maybe actual basketball would be more exciting like this.

The sound effects are…well, there are sound effects. The three sports balls sound like reasonably passable imitations of their real-world counterparts. The eyeball makes a weird “bink,” like a tiny spring. It also makes an vile squishing noise when it hits the ground – which happens a lot. Lastly, the moon, when tapped, sounds like a gunshot from Wolfenstein 3D. Fair enough though,

who am I to say what the moon sounds like when poked? Maybe it does sound like a digitized Luger.

Shoot the moon!

Also, you can’t listen to the iPod while playing Tapper Pro, which is an entirely silent venture beyond the various gunshots, squishes and thuds. I guess having your own music playing may ruin the ambience and immersion into the world of Tapper Pro.

I know I’m slagging on a product created by a few people in their spare time. The thing is, this game costs money. I can’t in good conscience recommend Tapper Pro to anyone. There are far better free games in the App Store that have more features than the $1 Tapper Pro. Usually “Pro” indicates that there’s a free version of the title available in the App Store, but I can’t seem to find one. This game has all the excitement of trying to put gumballs back into the machine and is probably less fun.

Tapper Pro
Pros

• Colourful, simple graphics
• Facebook integration
• I learned what the moon sounds like

Cons

• Insane physics engine
• Static environments
• The sound the eye makes freaks me out

Rating 1/5

Final Verdict: Not Recommended

Tapper Pro on the App Store

Developers webpage

It's Shocking

Okay, so enough about that other game… let’s discuss Save Yammi.  You are trying to help a little octopus named Yammi find his way home to the Gulf of Mexico while avoiding a nasty shark.  Of course, you won’t know this without checking out the iTunes description, since there isn’t any sort of intro in the game itself.  Too bad, because given the graphics quality I bet an intro would be really cool.  Anyway, to get poor Yammi through each level, for some reason you have to feed him a cookie.  As luck would have it, though, this is one stubborn octopus, and he won’t eat the cookie until you’ve collected the 3 yellow stars floating around the level.  There are also red stars, but those are just for bonus.

So how do you help Yammi?  You start the ball (or cookie, as it were) rolling by tapping the cookie.  At any point, as long as you have rope left you can draw a piece of rope on the screen to help guide the cookie.  This helps in both giving it a path to roll along and in blocking it from going places you don’t want it to.  Keep in mind that rope segments will fade away after a certain length of time.  As the levels get trickier you get items like teleports and bubbles that help keep the cookie moving.  The game currently has 100 levels spread across 10 cities, and so far every city has introduced at least one new concept.

Bubbly Personality

Your final score for each level is based on three factors: the three yellow stars (which you must get), the two red stars and how much rope you have left.  You only need the yellow stars to progress to the next level, but you can always go back and replay levels where you didn’t get all the red stars.  Save Yammi is also Game Center enabled, with a total of 16 achievements to earn and leaderboards to compete in.  Most achievements are built on doing a certain activity many times, so it should take you a while to collect them all.

The graphics are certainly one of the highlights of Save Yammi.  Not the backgrounds so much, mind you, as they are relatively plain compared to everything else.  However, all the objects look good, whether it’s a simple star or the grumbling thunder cloud.  Of course Yammi himself is awesome, with his big eyes and wonderful expressions.  If you leave the cookie rolling around him too long without having all the stars, he’ll even hold up a little sign to let you know that you need three stars.

Teleports

The sound effects are actually pretty decent.  However, the one thing that troubles me just a bit is how much Yammi sounds like a certain other adorable critter.  In fact, if you closed your eyes you’d be hard pressed not to think you were hearing Om Nom when Yammi crunches a cookie.  Sorry, that’s the last time I’ll bring that up.  The music is pleasant enough, but it seems there are only two tunes – one for the menu and one for actual game play.  Even if each city didn’t have its own theme, a couple more scores would be nice.

I lied – I’m going to mention it once more.  For those of you that feel like you’ve gotten your fill with Cut The Rope or think that this is going to be too similar in game play, please give it a chance.  The rest of you that don’t have those fears should have already bought it.  This game is extremely fun, and really not quite like the other games of its ilk.  I just hope it manages to break the top 10 for a while, because it deserves all the accolades its brethren have received.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

The Man Behind The Paper

The game is told from the point of view of Martin, a “painter mage” that lives in a world where magic has been banned by a maniacal emperor.  On a routine visit to your fiancée things start to go awry, and suddenly you find yourself embroiled in a mystery to figure out what has happened to your beloved.  To find your fiancée you’ll need to visit several locations, interact with some interesting individuals, and solve a few mind bending puzzles.  Most of the time traveling to a new location is a matter of tapping where you want to go or clicking the “back” arrow when provided, though sometimes you’ll have to interact with the environment to set of a chain of events to get you someplace new.

To use an item you select it and then tap on what you want to use the item on.  An item will stay selected until you tap on it again or select another item, so if you start getting a lot of messages like “are you kidding?”, it’s probably because you accidentally left an item selected.  Interacting with mini-game style puzzles really depends on the puzzle.  You’ll tap, swipe, drag, tilt and more to accomplish everything that you need to.  You also tap on people to interact with them.  Sometimes the tapping seems overly sensitive, and there were multiple occasions where it took me several taps to clear a dialog away because it kept coming back.  One thing I found rather interesting was that most every screen was at least wider or taller than the physical screen, and to move your viewpoint you use a virtual stick in the lower left corner of the screen.  It’s a cool feature, but I didn’t care for what I assumed to be auto centering on some scenes because of it.

In The Attic

There are several puzzles in the game, both inventory based and mini-game style.  My biggest issue was the difficulty of the puzzles.  I found myself more often than not consulting the in-game help or the developer for tips or solutions.  I do like the fact that the hint option is context specific and almost always in at least two parts, so you don’t get the whole solution if you don’t want it.  I just wish I wouldn’t have had to abuse it so much.  One other facet I’d like to mention is the whole idea of Martin being a “painter mage”.  This gives him the ability to create and manipulate artwork.  It’s actually a really powerful concept, and it’s used a couple of times in the game, but it should have been explored more in my opinion.

The visuals have a very distinct look about them.  Everything is very detailed, but there isn’t a whole lot of animation anywhere in the game.  There are also certain areas where the artistic skill isn’t nearly as strong – the human figure, for example.  I like the artwork, but it doesn’t wow me like some of the offerings on the App Store.  The sound effects are the same way.  Nothing really jumps out at you, and given the locales there are some missed opportunities for cool background noise.  I’d also love to see speech added to the game – who doesn’t want to hear a zombie talk?  The music is really good.  It has the feel of an action suspense movie, which is just what a game like this needs.

Help Me

Despite any grumblings I’ve mentioned, I would say The Train episode 1 is a decent start for The Moonwalls.  I was disappointed when it suddenly ended, because I was really getting into the story at the point.  If you tend to spend most of your time playing hidden object style games you might find this a bit daunting (not criticizing, because I love HoGs), but for more traditional adventure gamers this is worth checking out.  It’s a nice foundation for Martin’s world, and by the end you’ll want to pick up episode 2 (which should be out by the time I publish this).

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

Peace... Or Not

The premise behind each level is simple: burn everything that will catch on fire.  You have a certain amount of time with which to accomplish this task or you fail the level.  You can also earn up to three gems per level depending on how quickly you finish the level, though it is possible to complete a level without earning any gems.  When you beat a level a new one is unlocked, and when you complete all the levels in a world the next world is opened up for you.  There are currently 4 worlds with a total of 100 levels, and there’s a spot for a fifth world in the menu system, so hopefully we’ll see that one day.

To start a fire you drag a flame from its starting point to whatever you want to set on fire.  There are three different types of flames, each with their own abilities.  The yellow is the weakest, and can only burn ropes starting from the end of the rope.  The blue flame can burn a rope starting from anywhere and can also burn wood.  The green flame can burn anything and can set multiple things on fire before needing to be refueled, but it takes the longest to recharge.  In addition to simply running out of time, you’ll also get obstacles like stone (which can’t be burnt), drops of water that will put your flame out, and jets of gas that can be both good and bad.  My biggest obstacle, unfortunately, is that sometimes my finger gets in the way and I can’t tell what’s going on.  You don’t have to be directly on the flame to control it, but in my opinion the screen really isn’t big enough for relative control.

The Lost Ark

This is a bit of a spoiler, but I want to mention it because it’s probably the coolest mechanic of the game.  Once you get into the third and fourth worlds you get the benefit of the “time loop”, which actually lets you play a level twice with two different flames!  This is usually necessary because there are parts that can’t be destroyed by the first flame you get, but can be taken care of with the second flame.  The trick is figuring out how to maximize the use of your first flame so that you can make the most of your second flame when the time comes.  These levels are some of the most interesting but also the most challenging.  I have quite a few that I skated by with nothing more than a “win” (I had no gems) just because I wanted to see what came next.

The visuals in Burn It All are quite nice.  The board layouts look good, with a nice mix of rock, rope and wood.  And of course everything looks nifty when it’s on fire.  There are also some cool special effects like when a drop of water hits your flame or a gas jet accelerates your lighting ability.  The sound effects are decent as well, especially when it comes to the little noises and occasional words like “fire” that the flames utter.  The music is well written and there are enough tunes (at least from what I can tell) that you shouldn’t get bored with the soundtrack.

I Hate Bats

Burn It All is another extremely entertaining puzzle game, with enough differences from the pack to make it worth delving into.  Just a tad bit more variety on non-rope items that can burn would be nice, but at least there was something besides ropes to begin with.  The difficulty level gets somewhat extreme in the end, so don’t expect this to be a walk in the park, but it should keep the hardcore gamers happy.  Between trying to achieve 3 gems on 100 levels and attempting to earn all the achievements, you won’t run out of game to play for quite a while.  I think the base mechanic of Burn The Rope was a bit more novel, but in the end I found Burn It All to more accessible.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

I ask this simple question since the price of a HDMI cable can range from around $4.00 to $100.00 plus. From a simple visual inspection, most HDMI cables look very similar in that they have a common connector on each end, a specific length of cable in between and in some cases a magnetic loop on each end.

Cables are not all created equal. Generally speaking, cables created using lower grade materials tend to have a shorter lifespan and exhibit lower performance levels.

A HDMI cable is designed to connect two HDMI compatible devices together and transfer the high definition signal between the two devices. The signal is uncompressed therefore a high level of digital information is being transmitted through the cable regardless of the cost price of the digital devices. As with any connection cable, the signal quality will degrade as the cable gets longer and the quality of the wiring used is lower. As the signal degrades between the sending and receiving devices (DVD player and HD TV as an example), the quality of the picture and the audio will degrade significantly.

To ensure that the overall picture and sound quality is maintained, you need to have a transmission cable that can minimize the signal loss. In theory, a cable made with a compatible connector on either end and copper wiring in between will transmit the signal between the two digital devices. This is where the difference between the lower priced cables and the higher priced cables come into the picture. Most lower priced cables are just that. Copper wiring with compatible connectors and in some cases a magnetic loop to minimize external signal interference. Higher priced cables will use various methods to minimize the signal loss and ensure optimum signal retention.

 Here is a list of specifics that you should be aware of that helps to maintain the overall signal quality received by the high definition TV.

1: The quality of the copper wiring used internally. Higher quality copper wiring ensures that the signal loss and signal speed degradation is minimized. The amount of copper wiring used. Typically more copper wiring is required to send digital signals over older analog signals.

2: The quality of the outer shielding material used. Higher quality shielding minimizes the wear and tear when the cables are moved. The electronic signal interference from other electronic and mechanical devices are also minimized.

3; The quality of the end connectors used. Gold plated end connectors minimizes the signal loss between the devices and the cable.

4: Signal amplifiers built into the connectors. This ensures that the signal sent between the devices are of optimal strength to travel through the wiring and reach the intended target at the peak signal level.

An HDMI cable with “active technology” taps into the devices power source available via the HDMI connection. By accessing the available 5 volt /5 mA power, any cable that uses the RedMere “active technology” chip has the ability to use the power to equalize the signal. By doing this, the signal transfered through the cable can be boosted to reduce the amount of copper wiring required and produce the optimum level of signal output.

This means the copper wiring and shielding material can be reduced by 70 %. The HD video cable, typically very thick and cumbersome can now be made ultra-thin, portable and very flexible. The RedMere active technology chip used in a HDMI cable will allow you to have a clear high definition image and great audio output.

Thinner RedMere cable on the right

Companies that manufacture cables using the RedMere active technology include:

• Buffalo
• Monster
• PNY
• RadioShack
• Samsung

PHY Cable

Prices for these cables do vary but are typically in the $80.00 – $100.00 USD price range. I have only tried the test cable manufactured by RedMere and not the various cables that use the RedMere chip. This being said, any cable using the RedMere chip under the redmere specific guidelines should produce a high quality HDMI cable. The final choice of which cable to purchase would depend on the price and convenience to you.

There are other factors that determine your overall choice of cable based on distance between the source and receiving device, if the cable is to be exposed or installed within the wall, and if the cable will be used only for temporary connection like via a portable device and TV or permanently between a component DVD player and TV. Overall, any cable suited for your specific requirements that utilize the RedMere active technology should provide you with a quality video and audio signal.

I really like the RedMere active technology based HDMI cable since I tend to disconnect and connect other devices like my iPod Touch and video camera. The soft and thin cable makes it easier to disconnect and attach to other devices that will be connected for only a short period of time.

When purchasing any cable, try and get the retailer to demo the actual cable for you based on your setup requirements. This way you minimize the headaches when you get home. One last point to note: The HDMI cable should be marked indicating which end plugs into the TV and which end plugs into the sending device. Connecting the devices incorrectly will certainly produce poor results. Don’t let active words used in the packaging like EXTREME, HIGHEND, and PREMIUM convince you that the cable is better quality. Always check the specifications and ask the salesperson questions to ensure you are getting what you paid for and actually need.

Pros:

• Very flexible and lightweight.
• Readily available from a number of popular manufacturers.
• Clearly marked and simple to connect.

Cons:

• Can get pricey when dealing with longer cable lengths.

Final Verdict:

I would highly recommend using an active technology cable that uses the RedMere chip. The extra money invested in the high quality connection cable will ensure that you maximize your return on your money invested in the highend DVD player and HD TV.

RedMere

I’m going to begin by saying that I haven’t gotten into online music for any length of time before being asked to review Radical.fm. The longest I used one was when I turned on iTunes’ Genius and Ping – and forgot about them. To be honest I prefer the old-school methods of music discovery: be it borrowing a CD of obscure live tracks from a friend; using an app like Shazam while out and about; or even more traditionally, the radio.

That being said, I can see where Radical.fm wants to go, but it’ll be a while before it gets there.

When I received my beta invitation, the header of the email touted Radical.fm’s superiority over the big players like Pandora and Spotify. Given the latter’s much-anticipated entrance into the United States, it’s hard to see the niche in which Radical fits.

The Music

The selection in the beta is limited, but it has seemed to expand as I’ve been using the service. I tried a stream-of-consciousness search to see how varied the library is.

Paul Simon – Mother and Child Reunion (search returned only a live track)

Jack Johnson – The Horizon Has Been Defeated

The Police – Message in a bottle

B.B. King – 3 O’Clock Blues

Robert Johnson – Cross Road Blues

The Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil

The list was pretty impressive, showing me versions of “Sympathy for the Devil” by artists I wasn’t aware covered it (Blood, Sweat and Tears!). However, I hit a wall with the next song in my search: “Paint it Black” as covered by The Tea Party. It was a fairly popular song a few years ago, but I suppose that on a global scale the band may simply not be well known. I figured the omission could be addressed by the CRTC’s (Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission) draconian rules, or simply a qualm with record labels. A search for further Canadian artists turned up mixed results. There was a decent showing from The Tragically Hip, Barenaked Ladies, and a healthy dose of Rush. A few acts like I Mother Earth, Sloan, or The Trews are simply nonexistent.

Dipping into other genres I experienced the same hit-and-miss searches as I had in Rock. I was pleased with the healthy results returned by entering Sugarhill Gang, George Clinton (with and without Parliament Funkadelic) and N.W.A. I even came across a very unfortunate version of “Baby Got Back” by Vanilla Ice which, until recently, I was blissfully unaware of. My final hip-hop search was a surprise: nerdcore hip-hop artists MC Frontalot and Optimus Rhyme had a handful of tracks between them – more than I expected.

The Experience

This is a beta version, and it shows. Radical.fm is definitely built on some good bones, though. The UI is clean and unobtrusive, with the only ad space (so far) is relegated to a huge quarter-screen-filling banner to the right of the main panel. On login you’re confronted with the simple interface. Across the top you have your basic music controls: pause, play/next, and a microphone icon representing a voice recording/be-a-DJ feature that wasn’t available at the time of writing. Surrounding the controls you have a volume slider and elapsed/remaining time indicator. To the right of the controls you find the area of the the UI I personally spent the most time in. It shows the song currently playing (with expandable album art), options to play more, less, or block songs by the current artist, and finally a “Buy” link. Clicking this little shopping cart gives you the option to purchase the song from various outlets (at this time, only Amazon and iTunes). The same options are available for the previously-played song, but I found myself frustrated that I couldn’t go back any further than one song. Basically, if you didn’t catch the name of that band you liked that played two songs previously, you’re out of luck. Radical.fm does fancy itself a radio station, and that part of the real radio experience is replicated perfectly.

Below the main controls is the other place you’ll be spending all your time: the slider board. This is where you can create custom stations (like mine, “The Biology of Rock”, an attempt to explore the roots of rock throughout history). You’re given up to ten genres to dump into your very own station. I chose everything from “Punk” to “Funk”, “Old Rap/Hip-Hop” to “Alt Rock”, and…well, it isn’t exactly chock-full of variety. You can pick from a handful of rock eras, a few hip-hop and reggae options, and a sampling of house, trance, techno, and the like. There are some strange options, such as “Love Songs”, “Teen Pop”, “Today’s Teen Hits” , and “Recent Teen Hits”. In a search I came across both Leadbelly and Howlin’ Wolf, yet there isn’t a selectable “Blues” genre. It isn’t exactly “niche”. I imagine this will come with time, but I can’t see the necessity of three teen-centric genres – but maybe Beiber Fever hasn’t taken hold of me…yet.

The genres themes are assigned to sliders, which is probably the neatest feature of the service. Feel like more dirty power rock in your day? Slide the 80s Rock toggle to ten (eleven?) and get your Bon Jovi fix. A few hours later you’re tired of Poison and Queensryche (though I don’t see how that’s possible), so you take that slider down to three and drag your “Classic Pop” to seven and “Punk” to nine. Now you’re getting NOFX chased by Men At Work, which is a startling, but refreshing experience.

Another option for the slider board is custom playlist creation. This is where the generally user-friendly UI takes a dip. You (strangely) have two search boxes: one for artist, one for song names. The search does provide a suggest feature below as you type, which is nice considering how very picky the engine can be (“BB King” doesn’t show up, but “B.B. King” does). You search for a song and add it to your playlist. It’s straightforward and bare-bones. The simplicity has a few drawbacks, however. Don’t expect iTunes-style artist information here: you get song name, artist, length, and a link to purchase the particular song. You can then – click by slow click – scoot the chosen songs up and down within your playlist, or remove them entirely. Another issue with this format is the inability to add multiple songs in one go. Something we just expect in apps from iTunes to Gmail and everything between simply doesn’t exist in the beta. I really hope this basic feature makes it into the final build, because this oversight really brings down the experience for me. I don’t mind being obsessive-compulsive with my own music library, but I really can’t get behind going song-by-song with a service like this.

The last major feature of Radical.fm is the Radcast. This portion of the service lets you listen to other users’ stations and interact with them. You can “Steal” users’ stations – a bold word to use in the age of torrents, piracy, and the definition of ‘free’.  Once you’ve “stolen” a station or playlist, you can either simply listen to their stream, or add it to your own. The interface of the Radcast reminds me strongly of Mplayer, the ancient PC gaming and chat service from the turn of the century – in both aesthetics and operation. Take from that what you will. As someone who hasn’t been in a chat room since the days when modems screamed at you before logging in, this area didn’t really capture my attention. Granted, chat isn’t the point of this service – music is – but it just seems a little frivolous.

Radical.fm wants to be in your browser at home, at work, and in your pocket. The newest promotional video (which may draw more attention from the Beatles’ legal team than the services’ merits) states that they’ll be rolling out a mobile version. They’re promising iOS, Android, and BlackBerry apps “soon”. Having this service on the road would be a major plus for them. Strangely, the example they use for their multi-user station synchronization is a group of people jogging together. The idea is that they can all listen to the same station as they go along on their run, all happily hitting the pavement presumably in time with the music. Now, I don’t ever see myself in this situation, but if I can listen, in real-time, to the same song my friend in Sweden is listening to, that’s definitely a unique experience. Or you can do as I did: pick a random user and give their station a listen. Going from Sum 41′s “Fat Lip” to Barbara Streisand’s “People” is…different.

At its core, Radical.fm is a solidly built service that’s a little rough around the edges. It is clearly still a beta, and I feel it’ll hang on to that prefix for a while. It has some easy fixes to make and I’m going to keep checking back to see if their catalogue expands. If it does, and the mobile app deliver on their promise of real-time synched streaming, Radical.fm will be up there as a major contender in the industry.

PROS

Easy-to-use main UI.
Large library for a beta run.
Excellent sound quality.

CONS

Baffling genre selection.
Difficult playlist creation.
Pop-up confirmation/notifications nearly every time you make a change.

Final Verdict

I believe that Radical.fm has promise. As it grows and expands its library and irons out a few (easily fixable) bugs on its way out of beta, Radical.fm has a chance to be a major player on the streaming music scene. With innovate features like the genre-specific slider board and promise of real-time sync across multiple devices and platforms, Radical.fm does indeed set itself apart from the pack. A few features remain to be implemented (notably, the ability to broadcast your own voice live via your station), but for now it has a strong showing with what its got. For users wanting an easy-to-use and hands-free custom streaming experience, Radical.fm is sure to be music to their ears.

3.5/5

Final Verdict: Recommended

Radical.FM

Radical FM Player

Spinning Doom

The world of Paper Munchers is full of big monsters with their mouths wide open, just hoping that something small and scrumptious will pop in.  There are plenty of little monsters for them to consume, but the small critters don’t seem too eager to just jump into the jaws of death.  That’s where you come in.  As wielder of the bombs, you simply tap the screen to place an explosive device, and watch as monsters go flying.  Every monster will get consumed, but aside from helping you complete the level, only certain ones are beneficial to your immediate game play.

There are two types of bombs in this world: temporary and permanent.  Permanent bombs come in a group of three, and this group gets replenished each time you start a level.  The one saving grace to your collection of permanent bombs is that you can actually earn them back while playing a level.  The first critter of a certain color that lands in the mouth of a big monster of the same color after using a bomb will earn you a replacement bomb.  Don’t get too excited, though.  If you land a small pink monster in a big pink monster’s mouth, and then a blue one in a big blue monster’s mouth on the same turn, you won’t get two bombs.  Still, if you can manage it you should be able to keep your supply of permanent bombs coming.

The Corner Pockets

Temporary bombs, on the other hand, are quite fickle.  As their name implies, once you use them they are gone.  Don’t despair, though.  You can always buy bombs in the store.  Bombs cost currency, which you earn every time you complete a level.  Or, if you want to fast track things, you can spend your hard earned cash buying currency through in-app purchases.  It all seems a bit ironic if you ask me.  So far I haven’t run across a level I couldn’t beat with only my 3 permanent bombs (I ran out of temp bombs pretty quickly), but going this route you’ll certainly spend a lot of time on some levels.

The graphics in Paper Munchers are interesting to say the least.  The background employs the “make it look like paper” style of art, which I suppose has something to do with the name.  When implemented well it can be very stylish, and there’s no question that it looks fabulous here.  They even managed to make the oft times drab color pallet work.  The small creatures are basic shapes like rectangles and squares that have eyes and mouths, though they are certainly animated little shapes.  The hungry monsters start out as gnarly beasts with wide, gaping jaws, but later transform into other things like big organic saw blades.  One of the best (and admittedly rather morbid) parts of the visuals is the bones that are spit out when the monsters are done eating the small creatures.

The Blocks Cometh

The sound effects work well towards creating a darkly humorous mood.  The victims gurgle and chirp until they cease to exist, and in the case of the wide-jawed monsters, a nice little chomping sound followed by a spit completes the gruesome picture.  Other noises are appropriate to the types of monster you are feeding.  I will admit that I was a bit disappointed with the music, which is actually rather plain.  Given the atmosphere I would have almost expected a couple of Danny Elfman style tracks.

The main issue I have with Paper Munchers is that except for when you first complete a given level, currency doesn’t flow so freely in this game.  If you don’t mind spending some real do for fake currency, or you can live with 3 bombs once your supply of temps has been depleted, this is one very entertaining game.  Just remember that no actual monsters were harmed in the making of this software.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Infinity And Beyond?

Now that I’m done with my small sales pitch, you’re probably wondering what exactly Collision Effect is?  The game does little to explain what’s going on, but basically you have these entities called Zybbles, and you must make them collide.  In order to accomplish this you tap one Zybble of a certain color, and all others of the same color will head towards that one, culminating in a cool little explosion when they hit.  The thing is, you’ll quickly have multiple color groups on the screen at the same time, and you don’t want to (and often can’t) wait for one to clear up before you try to join another.  The other end of the equation here is that different colored Zybbles can’t touch (yeah, it’s Zybble segregation, but it’s only a video game).

Collision Effect has 3 game play modes.  Classic and Life Force are very similar in style.  Both require you to just keep on going until Zybbles of the wrong color collide.  There are a couple of power ups to help you, such as the meteor that blows up everything on screen when you touch it and the ice ball that slows down all movement temporarily.  The main difference is that in Classic mode one wrong collision signals the end of the game.  In Life Force mode, however, a bad collision starts a counter, and as long as you don’t get another bad collision before that counter gets to zero you can keep playing.  I do believe the counter gets longer every time you need it.

Four Corners

The third mode is Puzzle mode, and this one lets you take your time and think about your actions.  Don’t think this makes this mode any easier, however.  Each of the 120 boards starts with a static configuration of Zybbles, and you have to figure out which ones to tap and at what point to tap them so that each group can form without an incorrect collision.  At first it seems pretty simple, but it doesn’t take long before you realize that just a fraction of a second in timing makes all the difference in the world.  Some of these boards will definitely challenge most players.

The visuals are simply stunning.  There is no 3D, and not really even a lot of detail.  The Zybbles are basically balls of energy that leave particle trails, and the explosions aren’t that big.  However, when you start getting a bunch of particle trails of different colors crossing each other, and you watch Zybbles break the trails they go through, there’s something about it that just looks really awesome.  Of course the nebulous space background doesn’t hurt anything either.

Triangle

The sound effects mainly consist of what sounds like a musical note when you tap a Zybble (especially cool when you tap multiples and hear the different sounds), a small collision sound, and interesting, almost angelic tone right before Zybbles of a group collide.  The music on the title screen is almost mesmerizing.  I’m not sure why I mention that, because hopefully you don’t spend much of your time at the main menu, but there you have it.  The in game music is really cool because it starts off subtle, and at moments when you least expect it ramps up to help get the adrenaline pumping.  It’s a nice compliment to the overall aesthetics of the game.

So after all my times playing Collision Effect I still don’t know how to classify it.  Maybe it is a “dodge ‘em” game with a big twist.  Whatever you want to call it, Collision Effect is one of those games that is way too simple in concept yet insanely difficult to master.  It’s also one of those games that are worth it every step of the way.  Currently at 99 cents for a universal app, I can’t think of a reason not to check Collision Effect out.  But, if you really don’t believe me, there is a lite version as well.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Lots Of Produce

Like typical time management games, it’s all about the customer. Your customers will line up at the bottom of the screen, each one having a list of items they need to buy.  To fill their items you must make a sufficient number of matches in the match 3 board that takes up most of the screen.  Once you’ve match enough of an item a check will appear next to that item in the shopper’s list, and excess will go to the next shopper that needs it.  When all items are matched for a shopper a cash register appears.  The customer will eventually go away on their own, but you can clear them out early by tapping on them.

Of course every patron is losing patience as they stand around waiting, and I’m assuming they’ll leave if you don’t get their order filled before their patience runs out, though I haven’t had that happen yet.  The obvious cure for this is to fill their order in a timely fashion.  To help you random power ups will appear like candy to sooth the shoppers’ nerves and a cart to clear away rows of items and help shake things up a bit.  Each new power up is introduced after several levels of play, and once you’ve acquired a power up you can level up that power up to make it more useful.  The one thing I didn’t care for was that it seems like the hard candy, which only affects one shopper, always affects the first shopper instead of giving you a chance to pick.

I Did Good!

Speaking of upgrades, once you’ve completed a level you’ll earn stars based on reaching your goal, your expert goal, and the bonus set out for the level.  In effect you can earn up to three stars per level.  These stars can be spent upgrading power ups, food quality (which I assume means you need less matches to fill an order), and the store itself (for instance, adding 10 seconds to the clock at the start of the level).  There are a lot of items to upgrade and a lot of upgrade levels per item, so each game really could be a different experience from that perspective.

The graphics are certainly pleasant, though not quite up to the standards I usually expect from time management games.  The match 3 board looks decent enough, and you can certainly tell what everything is. Shopper portraits look alright, as does the image of the shopkeeper on the results screen of each level, but it’s clear the artist isn’t quite as skilled with drawing people.  The sound effects are adequate, and I do like the voices.  It’s just a shame the diva never has anything nice to say!  The music pretty much sounds like what you’d hear while walking around a supermarket, so I suppose your affinity towards the tune would depend on how much you like that somewhat generic elevator type instrumental.  For me it works.

Plenty Of Upgrades

The main drawback to Supermarket Scramble is that unlike traditional time management games, you don’t have as much control over your resources since they come from the randomly generated match 3 interface.  That aside, this game has managed to take two of my favorite casual genres and mash them up in an interesting and fun way.  I wouldn’t mind seeing the game get a bit of a facelift aesthetically, but that in no way detracts from the game’s entertainment value.  Whether you look at it as “you got your match 3 in my time management” or “you got your time management in my match 3”, what you end up with is a whole lot of fun.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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It's No Audrey II

I’m not quite sure how to proceed with this review, because I don’t simply want to regurgitate my words from my thoughts on part two.  However, everything I said there pretty much applies to Follow The Ghosts, so you can check out my review of The Enchanted Canvases here.  One thing I really like about this series is the use of “key” objects, or items in the background that when tapped produce a list of objects you must find in the scene.  What’s nice about the way this is done is that unlike a normal hidden object scene where everything is purposely cluttered, these key object quests happen on the normal screens, so it feels like the objects you are searching for are more naturally blending into the environment.

I also like the fact that the mini games are just that – mini.  While they are used to uncover something about the game, they are fairly basic and unobtrusive, and typically make sense.  So far in Follow The Ghosts the main form of mini game has been of the “assemble a picture from torn parts” variety, though one mini game has you swatting flies.  It’s a way to break up the potential monotony of object finding without burdening the player too much.

A Man And His Cat

As usual the game is a “tap the screen affair”, and aside from the occasional perceived lack of responsiveness the controls work quite well.  Fortunately you don’t get penalized for wrong taps, so there’s nothing to worry about in that regards.  The one thing I found a bit frustrating about Follow The Ghosts was that it seemed even worse than The Enchanted Canvases as far as actually finding key objects and the like.  Obviously finding the hidden objects should be a challenge, but when you can’t even determine where the starting point for your search is, that can be somewhat annoying.  At least you have unlimited hints to compensate for this, but I really don’t like using them if I don’t have to, and there have been times where even after I used a hint I thought to myself “I would have never thought of that”.

Once again the graphics are very well done.  The objects you need to find are easily discernable, unless you just don’t know what a particular object in the list is in the first place.  They haven’t upped the ante much in the animation department, though there are a few nice touches like a man petting the cat sitting next to him or the snapping plant.  Ambient sounds are a bit lacking in this iteration of Treasure Seekers, though the music is still certainly up to snuff.  One of these days I’d love to hear some voices put to Nelly and Tom.

Cute Little Monkey

There’s no question that Follow The Ghosts is yet another strong entry in the Treasure Seekers franchise.  I’m not sure that I like it quite as much as The Enchanted Canvases, but that opinion might change by the time I’m done with the game (we’ll have to see how the ending goes).  Whether you’re new to the series or a franchise veteran, there is plenty here to love.  I can’t wait to see what their next outing has in store for us.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

Red Ivan's Coming

It’s been a while since I started playing this game, so I don’t honestly recall the story, but from what I gather you’re a funny looking red dude that plays a mean trumpet and is trying to rescue an alien named Daisy.  In story mode you’ll have to beat 21 levels of bad guys, complete with three boss battles.  There’s also a survival mode that you unlock by completing story mode, but I haven’t gotten that far yet.  It’s not that the game is overly difficult, because you’ll pretty much fly through all the levels of each stage with little challenge except the boss levels.  It’s just that there appears to be a nasty glitch that prevented the last level from ending even though I defeated the bad guy, and I didn’t feel like tackling it again.

There’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to the level design in this game.  The enemies start of pretty sparse, but as the levels progress the screen will soon be flooded with adversaries.  When you take them down, some will leave notes for you to pick up.  These notes are worth either 1 or 5 points, and at the beginning of each level you can use those points to upgrade weapons and your ship.  The ship’s speed and shields can be upgraded, and each weapon can be upgraded for power and rate of fire.  What I really like about the system is that you get to keep whatever points you collect even if you don’t finish the level, so this ends up being one of those games where it won’t be impossible to fully upgrade all your weapons.  And trust me, there are times where you’ll need it.

One thing I find rather interesting is that once you’ve completed a block of seven levels, you can go back and play that level set again.  Your score will start back at 0, but it’s a chance for you to actually better your score from the first time around and earn achievements that you couldn’t earn before.  Don’t think this is necessarily going to be an easy way to earn extra points for upgrades, however.  I decided to test this out for kicks, and you don’t earn a whole lot of upgrade points on the first set of levels.  Guess the developers didn’t want you to “cheat” your way to victory!

Him again?

Your only option for controlling the game is to drag your finger around the screen.  Normally this is the option I prefer for scrolling shooters anyway, but in this case it starts my list of “what I don’t like about Front Runner”.  Your ship is pretty small, and unless I use my pinky, I’m covering the ship a good portion of the time that I’m playing.  This makes it rather difficult to dodge just in the nick of time, which is often required when lots of bullets are flying around.  Second, while it doesn’t happen very often, sometimes achievement notices will pop up, blocking the action.  That’s not very cool in my book.

Finally, I’d like to mention the errors.  I usually leave this part out, but in this case they were significant enough for me to bring them up.  The game pretty consistently crashes after about 10 to 15 minutes of playing.  Thankfully it’s usually between the shop and the next level, so at least I don’t lose anything.  Then there was the bug at the end of the last level.  This one I think happened because there were notes that I could not pick up, and it was like the game didn’t know that I had completed the last level.  As a result I was stuck and had to shut the game down, and even though I had beaten the final boss I now have not completed the game yet.  That is definitely not cool.

Graphically the game is quite charming.  There are only a few types of adversaries, but each one looks quite different, and the end bosses actually have some personality to them.  Some of the objects appear to be clay moldings like in OddBlob or Platypus, but the overall style doesn’t seem to match that, so I’m not really sure if they’re 3D models or just good old fashioned pixel art.  Whatever the case, it looks pretty good.  I really like the look of the protagonist as well, but sadly you don’t really get to see him except for in the title screen.

Bad Guys Keep On Comin'

The sound effects for the most part were just okay – there really wasn’t anything new to be heard here.  I did, however, crack a smile every time a villain would come out and wag its tongue at me.  I was actually somewhat disappointed in the soundtrack.  Especially when compared to several of the scrolling shooters I’ve played recently, the music was generic and bland.

I’m really torn on this one.  It’s not very in-depth (most gamers should easily beat the game in an hour or two), and the bugs are a bit annoying, especially whatever caused me to dump on the last level before I could win the game.  There’s not really anything new about the game compared to others of its type either.  Still, I did have fun playing it and the bosses are quite amusing.  Everything points to me giving this a Not Recommended, but instead I’m just going to caution you strongly that you might experience some stability issues with the game.

Final Verdict: On The Fence (leaning towards Not Recommended)
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[All About Quick Looks]

A Turtle Or A Crayon?

Apparently a scientist has concluded that if turtles can fly then humans can as well, and you get to be the lucky guinea pig to test out this theory.  All you have to do is strap on a rocket pack and sail into the heavens as high as you can.  Unfortunately, it appears that even though you are in a no fly zone, you can expect to see obstacles like hot air balloons, planes and more.  There are also strong pressure areas marked by arrows that will push you back down just a bit.  This might hamper you just a bit, but it could also save you from a nasty collision, as it gives you a chance to adjust your course just a bit on the way back up.  You also have to fight wind gusts, which are indicated by a directional arrow and number on the left side of the screen.

So how do you combat all this?  The most important thing is to stay in flight.  You start off with just your main rocket engine, but eventually you’ll be able to by a temporary booster.  Whether using the booster or not your main fuel will eventually run out, and your booster has its own fuel tank.  You can pick up red and blue cans respectively to reload your fuel.  You’ll also take damage when colliding into obstacles, but collecting the heart and wrench icon will replenish some of that health.  There are also gems to collect that help you earn money towards upgrades.  You also earn money simply for staying in flight, and each level has four achievements that provide you with a significant amount of money when completed.

Into Space We Go

Each upgrade has anywhere between 3 to 9 levels, and include things like better control, resistance to air and wind, less damage when hit, and more efficient fuel consumption.  Which order you perform the upgrades in depends mainly on your cash flow and what you think will suit you best, but chances are you’ll max out all the upgrades before completing the game.

The controls are pretty simple.  The left and right arrows turn the turtle left and right respectively, and the rocket button gives your turtle power.  Actually controlling the turtle is a different story, however.  While you can upgrade anything at any time as long as you have the money, I’d suggest working on things like air and wind resistance and the actual “better control” upgrade early on, as these items will make your navigational life easier.  As you start going faster and moving to more advanced levels, though, these options don’t seem to make as much of a difference, so don’t be surprised if you sometimes feel like you’re going out of control even if you’re barely adjusting your left or right directions.

Fuel Looks A Lot Like Coke...

One might label the visuals as “doodle like”, especially since many of the developer’s other games has Doodle in the title.  However, much like his other games, Turtle Fly has much better graphics than the average doodle game.  The vehicles look decent enough, and I really like the turtle as he goes through his different phases of shell, booster and plain turtle.  The different hats for protection are a nice touch as well.  The sound effects work well enough, and the fizz of a pop can being opened when you collect extra fuel is somewhat amusing.  The music is pretty good, though more than one song would be nice.  There doesn’t have to be one for each level, but at least have two or three songs that can be selected in an option screen or something.

I won’t tell you that Turtle Fly is this best this genre has to offer, or that it even really breaks any new ground, because it isn’t and it doesn’t.  However, Turtle Fly is certainly a very solid entry in the genre, and its level achievements and extensive upgrade system certainly give you plenty to play for.  My one concern would be how difficult the last few levels will be seeing as I’ve already almost maxed out all of my upgrades on level 4, but I don’t think I’ll have to worry about the for a while.  If you’re in the market for a new “perpetual climbing” games and you want to see a turtle fly, Turtle Fly is certainly worth checking out.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

Classic Arcade Machine

Neon Mania is currently comprised of 9 groups, each containing several images that look like neon signs gone dark.  It’s your job to bring the signs “back to life” by tracing the parts of the images to light them back up.  Once you start tracing a segment you must finish it, and once you’ve traced all segments you’ll get a ranking from 1 to 3 stars depending on how well you traced the image.  Personally, I’m not 100% convinced the scoring is accurate, because there were times where I’d trace an image and get two stars, then trace it again thinking I did a better job and get only one star.  Other times I’d stay at my current ranking even though I felt I did a much better job tracing the image the second time.

To trace the image you simply press where the flashing stars are and then trace the corresponding line to completion.  For straight lines this isn’t too bad of a proposition.  For curved lines, on the other hand, this task can be quite daunting, especially if the line has a lot of tightly wound curves or sharp angles.  This problem is augmented for me by a combination of the small screen and my larger fingers.  Kids should be fine with the game, but I think it would be a better experience for me on the iPad.  The other problem I have is that sometimes there are several stars close together, and when I think I’m starting one line I’ve actually started another.  I’m not sure how much of an issue this is because I don’t know what all goes into factoring the final score.

The River Flows

On the plus side, if you can get past all the nuances of the line drawing itself, there is plenty to do.  As I mentioned in the beginning there are 9 groups of objects.  The smallest group contains 21 items, and the largest holds 175!  There’s also the fact that you can earn up to three stars for each object, so while you might get through a group, getting through the group with perfection is a whole other story.  The game also has 16 achievements to earn and supports both Game Center and OpenFeint, so you’re covered by both the major social network players.

The graphics are pretty simple, but the objects still look really good.  I don’t think there’s a lot you could do to something that should look like a neon sign to make it flashy without ruining it.  The backgrounds are pretty basic as well, though the Easter image set has a couple of nice selections that it toggles between.  The sound effects are okay, with a nice little ding to confirm that you’ve completed a line or a slight buzzer to let you know you’ve made a “wrong turn”.  The music is nice and easy to listen to, but reminds me a little too much of elevator or lounge music.

Pizza

This game was definitely made with the causal gamer in mind.  Beyond that, though, there are times where it feels like an iPad game crammed onto an iPod Touch screen.  Still, aside from not 100% understanding how scores are determined, I have enjoyed my time spent with Neon Mania.  I think hardcore gamers will be disappointed, but everyone else should consider giving it a try.  I’d especially recommend Neon Mania if you let your kids use your device on a frequent basis (or if you happen to be a kid reading this review).

Final Verdict: Recommend
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

Water The Cactus Too

In Desertic you’re in charge of making sure the flowers in the desert can soak up what little drops of rain fall during the blistering heat.  You’ll have 3 flowers at a time, and you must make them grow until they get big enough to fly away in the wind.  A cloud will travel across the top of the screen and periodically release a drop of rain.  You must swipe that drop in order to guide it towards the top of one of the flowers.  It has to hit the top of the flower, so you need to account for the fact that the flowers will always be gently swaying.  There’s also the wind factor to take into consideration.

Your task won’t be nearly this easy, however.  Locusts will try and destroy your flowers.  You must tap them to destroy them, or double-tap a rain drop close enough to them to dispose of them.  There are also camels that fly by and occasionally lose their wings (told you this was weird).  If you tap a falling camel it will get its wings back and fly away, otherwise it will crush whatever flower it hits and cause it to shrink somewhat.  As the sun gets hotter it can cause the flowers to shrink as well.  The heat also makes the locusts angrier and can cause the lone cactus in the background to dry up and explode.  If you double-tap a rain drop by the cactus it can rehydrate the cactus somewhat.

Flowers Under Glass

Conceptually it’s actually a nifty little game.  The main issue that I have is that unless I’m missing something, it’s awfully hard to steer the rain drops.  I could probably learn to live with that if there wasn’t so much going on, even in the easy level.  Sometimes I find myself smashing bugs and tapping camels so much that I’m completely neglecting the rain drops.  Also, up until the last couple of games I played, it was quite difficult to stop the camels from falling.  Overall it just seems like the controls aren’t sensitive enough where they need to be and are too sensitive in other places.  Or, I could just be really bad at the game.  Still, I don’t think it’s me.

The visuals are pretty good, though something doesn’t seem to gel quite right between everything.  Even so, the camels and locusts look nice, and the flowers are just right as they wither and grow.  There are even nice little touches like steam that rises from the flower pedals if they get too hot.  One thing that does look a bit unusual to me (if such a thing applies to this game) is that the camels almost appear to be swimming.  The sound effects are just as torn between sensible and crazy.  The locusts sound good, but like all infestations get annoying after a while.  The camels sound like humans screaming when they fall.  If you successfully use a large drop of water you get some applause.  In some respects this feels like a Monty Python sketch.  There is some music, and it does a really good job blending into the background, though I’m not really sure it’s worth listening to on its own.

Even The Nights Are Deadly

So by now I’m not quite sure if I’ve enticed you or scared you off a bit.  If you’re looking for something entertaining and a bit different, I’d say Desertic is a good choice for you.  Keep in mind that you need some pretty quick reactions after a while, however, so if you prefer slow, casual games this probably will intimidate you within a few levels.  The visuals are decent, and it’s almost worth it just to hear the falling camels scream once or twice.  I wouldn’t put this at the top of my list, but it certainly would be worth giving a try.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

Free The Rabbit

Somehow cute little critters have gotten themselves trapped in bubbles, and it’s your job to get them out. Different colored bubbles will continually float to the top of the screen, and when two or more of the same color are touching you can tap the group to pop them. Ultimately your goal is to clear a path so that the animals’ bubbles will touch the top of the screen, at which time they will pop on their own and the animals will be free. There is no other way to pop an animal’s bubble. A level is complete when you rescue the designated number of animals. The game is over when your time runs out on a particular level.

Along the way you’ll get certain power ups to help you clear the screen. They are surrounded in bubbles as well, and must be matched just like any other bubble. The anvil floats to the top then falls to the bottom of the screen, destroying every bubble in its path. The lightening bolt gets rid of all other bubbles of the same color as its bubble was, and the mine destroys a few bubbles around its proximity. The clock obviously adds more time to the level. This power up is the one exception because it is encased in ice instead of a bubble. You free it by popping groups of bubbles around it, shattering the ice.

I'm Number One

The main obstacle is of course the bubbles themselves. The board is in constant motion, so what one second might two touching bubbles another second might have just enough space between them to keep you from popping them. Also, it’s not uncommon to clear a path for an animal, just to have the space get filled up by other bubbles before the animal gets there. Time is an obstacle as well (at least when it runs out). Your ranking is also based on time. The other thing I’ve run into so far is animals that are wrapped in “layers”, where every layer except the innermost one must be popped first by combining it with a group of bubbles of like color.

Controlling Animal Pop is quite simple – just tap to pop bubbles. Power ups are used as soon as you free them, so there’s nothing additional required there. Unfortunately there is only one game play mode, and there are currently no achievements either for OpenFeint or Game Center. Hopefully both of these things will change in future releases. Granted the game as it stands right now is pretty fun, but it could use both these things I’ve mentioned to be even better.

Anvils Can Float?

The visuals are pretty decent. The bubbles actually look nice, the animals are cute, and the backdrop is simple but charming. The only thing that seems a bit out of place is the clouds, which are somewhat blocky in nature. They don’t look bad, but they don’t really fit the overall style of the graphics either. The sound effects are actually enjoyable, especially when it comes to the animal noises when they are freed. I don’t know how authentic they are (I’m pretty sure no animal goes “ewww” in real life), but they sure make for entertaining video game noises. The music is good and very light-hearted, but it would be nice if there were a couple of different themes mixed up between the levels.

If you’re looking for a lot of variety, this definitely isn’t the game for you. With one game play mode and no achievements, it can get a bit repetitive even if it does click for you. Thankfully I quickly grew to enjoy it, so the repetitive nature doesn’t really bother me. Besides, rescuing those cute little animals makes it all worthwhile. If you have kids, this is a game they will certainly enjoy as well. There are better matching type games out there, but the constantly shifting playing field and animal rescuing goal are twisty enough to make this one worth playing.

Final Verdict: Recommended

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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

Just Getting Started

I’ve gone over the basics of marble poppers in the past, but just in case there’s anyone reading this who is not familiar with the concept, it’s basically match 3 with groups of objects heading towards a “danger zone”.  Your goal is to shoot individual objects into the group such that you create a section of three or more objects of the same color, eliminating those objects and reducing the size of the groups.  All groups on each level must be eliminated to move on.  If one group makes it to the “danger zone”, then either the level or the game is over, depending on which mode you’re playing.

The game has the standard quest mode, where you progress through a series of increasingly difficult levels.  In this mode you can collect amulets, which will give you certain bonuses when you decide to wear them (use is unlimited, but only one amulet at a time is allowed).  The next mode is challenge, where you can play any level you’ve beaten in quest mode, attempting to get the smallest time on each of four difficulty levels.  Finally you have survival mode, where you select an amulet and then progress through a series of levels, just trying to last as long as you can on each level.  Normally with a game like this I stick to one mode, but in Sparkle they are all equally entertaining.

Big Flash

Controlling the game is dead simple – just tap where you want to fire.  The game is very responsive, so if you miss it’s just because you didn’t time your tap or have your aim right.  Power ups are used automatically, and there are a number of really fun ones that you can get.  Some of my favorites include “revenge of the moon”, which rains particles down on the level and destroys a bunch of objects, and another one that backtracks from the danger zone to about half way through the level, destroying everything in its path.  I’m not 100% sure what all the different power ups do, but if you’re diligent about hitting them you can make quick work out of a level without having to fling too many extra objects.

Visually this game is all about flash.  That’s not always a stringent requirement of mine, but it sure makes me happy when it’s there.  The menus look cool, the backgrounds look good, and even the objects are pretty nifty, even though they are basically just spheres.  What really sticks out, however, are the darkness and spell effects.  Whether it is initially tracing over the level or oozing out of the danger zone when a group gets too close, the darkness is almost creepy.  When a spell takes effect there is usually some sort of particle effects or sparkles or whatever.  This is by far one of the best looking marble poppers on the App Store.

Here They Come

The sound effects are surprising well done too.  Usually I could give or take the sounds, but in this case they actually manage to enhance the atmosphere.  Granted it sounds kind of like you’re playing pool as the objects clank together, but the spells each have a unique audio quality.  I especially like the cackle when you acquire the joker orb.  And the there is the music.  It’s classical… it’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes”… it’s from a Tim Burton soundtrack… in the end all I can say is that it’s pretty amazing.  I could easily sit and listen to the music while working on other stuff, but it’s too alluring to pick up the game and start playing again.

If you haven’t gathered by now, I like this game just a little bit.  In fact, I’d say it’s my most played game of the week so far, and not just because of the review (which is just a bonus, because this wasn’t on my list to review anyway).  If you like marble poppers, shame on you should this be absent from your collection. If you’ve never tried one before, what are you waiting for?  Sparkle’s probably one of the best places to start.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

WiFi2HiFi for iPhone is a new app allowing users to stream computer’s music to any audio dock or home music system connected to your iPhone. Some of the features of WiFi2HiFi to note include:

    * Ability to use one’s preferred music program to wireless stream audio from one’s computer
    * Listen to your computer’s music library while selecting the songs with your preferred remote app
    * Super sound quality
    * Streaming begins as soon as your iPhone is detected by the app

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMAdZZblIwU

More details are available @ WiFi2HiFi & iTunes

To have a chance to win one of the 3 licenses of WiFi2HiFi, you must post a response to this posting with an answer to this question:

• Do you currently find listening to a variety of streaming audio via your iPhone/iPod Touch very simple to do?
• If not, explain briefly why?

You must provide a valid email address when posting to qualify. Your email address will be kept private and only used to commuicate via Technobrains. 3 lucky winners will be chosen on Sunday April 17th @ 9 pm local time. Winners will be contacted shortly thereafter to confirm there acceptance of the GIVEAWAY. Once all 3 winners have been confirmed, their posted names will be listed as the winners.

Good Luck.

Technobrains is giving away licenses of WiFi2HiFi to 3 lucky iPhone users.

WiFi2HiFi for iPhone is a new app allowing users to stream computer’s music to any audio dock or home music system connected to your iPhone. Some of the features of WiFi2HiFi to note include:

* Ability to use one’s preferred music program to wireless stream audio from one’s computer
* Listen to your computer’s music library while selecting the songs with your preferred remote app
* Super sound quality
* Streaming begins as soon as your iPhone is detected by the app

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMAdZZblIwU

More details are available @ WiFi2HiFi & iTunes

To have a chance to win one of the 3 licenses of WiFi2HiFi, just post a response to this blog with an answer to this question:

• Do you currently find listening to a variety of streaming audio via your iPhone/iPod Touch very simple to do?
• If not, explain briefly why?

3 lucky winners will be chosen on Sunday April 17th @ 9 pm local time. Winners will be contacted shortly thereafter to confirm there acceptance of the GIVEAWAY. Once all 3 winners have been confirmed, their posted names will be listed as the winners.

Good Luck

NOTE: GIVEAWAY DEADLINE EXTENDED to April 24, 2011.

Insult Time

You play the lone gunman, trying to take down a ninja clan that would just assume taunt you as shoot you.  Now don’t get me wrong – they will shoot you, so you might just want to level the playing field before that happens.  You start the game with a pretty much worthless pistol, but since it’s free you won’t be complaining.  As you take down ninjas you’ll earn money towards things like weapon upgrades and magic.  You can also earn money by insulting the ninjas, which is both more fun and more profitable.  I’ll discuss that more later on.  On the flip side, you can money when innocent bystanders dying.  And if you think you’re being extremely careful with your shots, don’t worry.  It won’t be you that dispatches the innocents most of the time.

The main allure to this game is the insult system.  When available, an arrow with the word insult will appear above a ninja’s head.  Being careful to tap the arrow, you will engage in a round of slinging hash.  If you start, you will lose.  This mode is just for you to learn the appropriate responses to the most heated insults.  If the ninja starts, you will only win if the retort to the ninja’s insult has already been revealed to you.  You will be presented with a list of retorts, and you either need to pick the one that goes with the insult or just pick one at random.  If you were able to select the appropriate retort you’ll earn $30 (and you can still shoot and kill the ninja for an extra $10).

Lift Him Up

Control in the game is primarily a matter of tapping.  You tap to shoot, tap to start an insult war, and tap to select choices during the insult war.  If you’re luck enough to afford magic, the electrocute and freeze spells work by tapping on the spell and then tapping on the recipient.  The only one that’s a bit different is levitation, where you drag the ninja you want to levitate and then let go once you have them where you want them.  The game does suffer a bit from “fat finger” syndrome (which I can say because I have fat fingers), but I haven’t run into too many shooters that didn’t.

The big problem I have with the game is in the balance of difficulty.  You start off with $100 and a free pistol, so all seems well.  The problem is that the least you need to spend to use a spell is $150 ($100 for the spell and $50 to buy some mana).  Health and bullets each cost $1 a unit.  The bare minimum for a gun upgrade is $200.  By the time you’ve theoretically racked up enough money to get a gun upgrade or buy a spell, you’ve wasted all that extra cash refilling your life and bullets.  Even if all I’m spending my money on is bullets (and life when I really have to), I’m out of bullets by the end of the 4th level.  No bullets and you’re dead.  Either the prices need to be more reasonable or there need to be power ups you can shoot to earn extra lives, bullets or money.

Not The Village People

The visuals are lots of fun.  Whether or not they are, the characters have a digitized look to them, which for some reason reminds me of the old Sega Genesis game Pit Fighter.  The backgrounds look pretty good, though the characters don’t quite seem to fit with the backgrounds, adding to the cheese factor.  The silly animations of the innocents strolling back and forth doesn’t help any either.  The sound effects are pretty standard for the most part, but I do love the “woo-hoo” when a ninja first drops in.  There’s only one track for the music, yet for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on I really enjoy it.  That’s good, of course, since there is only one track.

Ninja, Please has the potential to be an incredible homage to those 80s arcade machines with the gun attachments.  The action is there, the graphics are solid, and the music is nice.  The insult system is a nice touch that even puts the game a step ahead of the rest.  However, the extreme difficulty sucks all the joy out of the game, especially when you know you’re going to consistently run out of ammo by the third or fourth level.  As I’ve said earlier, to me this feels more like a game imbalance than a true desire to make the game difficult.  As a result, until this problem is taken care of I sadly cannot suggest you spend your money on this game.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

It’s hard to believe almost a year has passed since I took a look at the first Chop Chop “trilogy”.  Of those games Chop Chop Runner was by far my favorite, and I honestly wasn’t a big fan of Tennis.  Since then 4 new Chop Chop games have been released, so as you can tell I’m a bit behind.  I want to get with the times, as it were, so I’m going to fast forward a bit to Chop Chop Caveman, the last game of the second “trilogy”.  Now I’ll probably have to stop calling them that, since I don’t know that the games will always be released in groups of three, so it’s out of my system.  Anyway, I haven’t had the chance to play Hockey yet, but of the Chop Chop games I’ve played thus far, Caveman is definitely the best.  The game is the most polished of their 2D efforts, and the puzzle / platform genre for me is more interesting than sports games.

Physics Based Puzzles

Chop Chop Ninja was an okay game, but I think Chop Chop Caveman is the game that Ninja wanted to be.  You play a cute little caveman with a bad haircut that just wants to eat.  In order to satisfy your hunger you’ll need to bash the denizens of your world into bite sized portions.  Depending on the critter you can do this either by head butting them, slamming them on the descent of a jump, or throwing stuff at them.  Once crushed they’ll turn into meat that you can eat which not only gets rid of them but has the added benefit of giving you a health point back if you’ve lost one.  Some creatures will also eat the meat left over by other creatures, which I found to be a neat and amusing touch.

When you’re not busy feeding your face there are pebbles to collect, as well as three big jewels and a special food item on each level.  You can beat the level without getting the jewels or food item, but I suspect it might be worth your while to collect everything if you can.  In addition to collecting things and dispatching enemies there are also puzzles to solve.  Along the way you’ll be able to pick up items that you can throw, and you can use these items to either collect hard to reach items or to knock over or destroy things in order to open up the path so you can continue your quest.  None of the puzzles so far have been overly difficult, but sometimes you have to think about just the right place to hit something to cause the effect that you want.

Intuitive Touch Controls

To control your character you can either use a virtual d-pad or a method where your actions are based on the location you tap relative to the caveman.  The relative positioning thing isn’t bad, but I much prefer the virtual d-pad.  This gives you buttons for moving left and right, jumping, and bashing / headbutting when appropriate.  To pick up the objects that you can throw you just walk into them, and to actually throw them you draw a path in the direction you want them to go.  You do have to be careful that you’re not standing under an object you throw should it come back down, because it can actually hurt you.

There’s no question the game play is the best out of any Chop Chop game I’ve played so far, but I’d have to say that sentiment follows through to the graphics as well.  The caveman looks great with his bowl haircut and lack of general facial features (except for a big mouth at the moment he eats something).  The dinosaurs are quite amusing in their design, especially the Tyrannosaurus like one with the stubby legs.  Each level set has a unique look while still retaining the overall feel of a platform game.  All they need to do is transfer this level of style to their 3D engine and they’ll have some of the best looking 3D cartoon games around.

Classic Action Platformer

The sound effects are decent enough, though I wouldn’t in any way rave about them.  What I do like is the little chomp every time the caveman eats something.  What I find a bit disappointing is that none of the dinosaurs make any noise.  What’s up with that?  Anyway, the music makes up for any deficiencies in the sound effects.  Each world has its own theme, and so far they’ve been pretty enjoyable.  While I feel good music is important to any game, I remember spending lots of time with certain console games on pause, just listening to the music (especially in the 16 bit era).

Based on what I’ve played of Chop Chop Caveman so far, I’m looking forward to seeing what the franchise will have to offer moving forward.  They’re definitely refining their work with each new installment in the Chop Chop Universe, and it will certainly be worth keeping an eye on over the coming months.  In the mean time, if you haven’t already delved into the world of Chop Chop, or you just haven’t gotten Caveman yet, I wouldn’t wait any longer.  The traditional platform game play blended with basic physics puzzles and whimsical prehistoric cartoon characters is certainly worth the asking price.  Not to mention the fact the game is universal, and it runs really well on my “ancient” iPod Touch 2G with iOS 3.1.3.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

I Think I Can...

Not wanting to be the type to snub my peers, however, I picked up the game based on all the accolades it was receiving via Twitter.  I installed the game, and then… it sat.  I had other things to do, of course.  After a couple of days, though, the temptation was too much, so I loaded up the game and played it.  Then I played it again.  Before long I thought, “You know, I’d be remiss not to tell my readers about this game”.  So, here we are and now you’re all caught up.

In Tiny Wings you play a little bird that appears to love two things: flying and sleeping.  He’ll also eat any coins and boosters that are in his way, but that’s a whole other story.  To start the game your bird has a little bit of bounce in him.  It’s up to you to get the bird going and keep him going for as long as you possibly can.  The longer the bird stays on the ground, the more quickly dusk approaches, and as soon as the sun sets are fine feathered friend will go back to sleep.  Keeping him airborne is all about timing.

Hills And Valleys

The landscape is chock full of hills and valleys.  Obviously as the bird goes down a hill he will gain momentum, and as he climbs back up he will lose that momentum.  You can help things along a bit by making the bird “heavy”.  You do this by tapping the screen, which will cause the bird to fold in its wings and weigh itself down.  Done at the right time, this action will help the bird accelerate enough that it can use the upward slope of the next hill as a launching mechanism.  Done at the wrong time, however, and you’ll slow yourself down even more.

If you get a good rhythm going you can eventually keep the bird aloft for extended periods of time.  However, there are also times where you actually want to keep the bird on the ground.  You start out with a score multiplier of ten, and you can raise that in increments of two by completing certain tasks.  Those tasks might be something like getting a certain number of perfect slides or collecting a designated number of coins.  Each multiplier increase will generally require several objectives be completed, though thankfully you don’t have to complete them all in one run.  Also, the game doesn’t actually come outright and tell you what the objectives are, so be sure to click the Objectives button at the main menu to figure out what you have to do.

Fly Away

The graphics are decent enough.  The bird is cute, and the randomly generated landscapes look like something ripped from a Beatles animated movie.  One of the ground textures even makes it look like you’re sliding around on the back of a really long stegosaurus.  The sound effects are simple but really effective.  Sometimes it sounds like the bird is actually saying thank you, and I chuckle every time he screams “yahoo” when drifting between islands. There’s only one song during game play, but it fits the whole atmosphere so perfectly you won’t care.  Besides, it’s a good song.

This is one of those games that sounds like it would almost be too simple to be any fun, yet it’s one of the best experiences I’ve had on my iPod Touch in quite a while.  I’ve seen a couple of comments claiming that the game is only worth “five minutes of fun”, but the reality is I don’t think I’ve ever played just one game in any given sitting, and I know I’ve gotten a lot more than five minutes of fun out of it.  The truth is that no matter how many times I’ve slipped down the slopes of island number one, it never gets old.  I may be singing a different tune in a few months, but the truth is there are almost no games that can hold my attention that long.  As for Tiny Wings, I’m confident my money was well spent.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

The Treehouse

The basic idea of the game is that you’re trapped on an island and are trying to escape.  This plot summary mainly comes from the title, because there is no exposition to be found in this game.  I do wish there were a bit of narrative, but it hasn’t dulled my enjoyment of the game any.  The structure of the game is that each area has multiple scenes with hidden objects.  You find all the objects, complete a simple mini-game, and then you are awarded with an object that will help you escape the island.

Each scene has 2 locks in it.  If you collect 25 locks you’ll open up the ability to play all the match 3 mini-games separately from the main game.  If you collect 50 locks you’ll open up a free roaming seek and find mode.  Ironically, I’m not sure how necessary these modes are, as there’s already plenty of content with 25 objects to collect in order for you to get off the island.  Still, it’s nice to have the other options available, and the locks are usually among the easiest things to find in a given scene.

Match 3

The controls are pretty standard.  You pinch or double tap to zoom in and out.  Swipe movements slide the screen around when it is zoomed in, and tapping on an object selects it (or not if it’s not the appropriate object).  Mini-game motions are dependent on the game, but usually involve some sort of tapping and swiping.  The game suffers from the same pitfalls as any other hidden object game, but really doesn’t handle them any better or worse than any other game.

One thing about Escape Rosecliff Island is that it is big on scoring.  You get points for each correct object you find and bonus points if you find multiple objects in rapid succession.  You also get points if you find all the objects in a level without using hints, and you get points for finding all the locks.  Conversely, you can lose points for making too many wrong guesses, and you also lose points every time you use a hint.  The levels are timed, but if you’re careful you can actually study the scene and avoid false taps without running out of time.

Clean The Keyboard

The visuals are very nice.  The backgrounds are well drawn, and for the most part objects are hidden without being so obtuse that you can’t find them without using a hint.  There are a few scenes that are a bit too dark in my opinion, and most times I end up using one hint in a scene because either an object blends in too well or I just don’t know what the object is, but overall the visuals are sharp and don’t impede game play.

The sound effects are decent enough, but it seems like the same set of sounds for every scene.  That means that the island is full of flies, there’s one ornery fly chasing you around, or they need to mix up the sound effects a bit more.  The music is actually pretty good, though I will say that I don’t really listen to it all that much except for times like this when I’m actually doing something besides playing the game while the game is still running.  In other words, the music sounds good but it almost blends into the background too well.

Pick Your Poison

Escape Rosecliff Island does nothing out of the ordinary, and some might even say that it’s a step backwards in the evolutionary chain of hidden object games.  Personally, I find that refreshing every once in a while.  The scenes are challenging but not frustrating, the mini-games are a nice diversion but are simple enough that they don’t impede your progress, and there’s plenty of content to keep you busy until you’ve played your money’s worth.  I wouldn’t want every hidden object game to regress in this fashion, but as long as the ones that do are of this quality, I’ll take it every once in a while.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

These Woods Are Dark

You’re not presented with the story right away, and I’m not big on launching a story through the options screen, so I didn’t check it out.  However, I’d imagine it’s along the lines of the first game, where the forest has been overrun by evil and you have to thwart it.  The reality is the story really doesn’t matter, since it’s never expounded upon with cut scenes or anything.  All you really need to know is that you run through the forest, shoot everything that moves towards you (you can’t shoot what you’re not supposed to hit) and make it to the end of each level.

To control your character you have left and right buttons on the lower left side and jump and shoot buttons on the lower right side.  The controls seem a lot more responsive this time around, though there still are some issues mostly revolving around jumping and moving at the same time.  Collision detection is still an issue as well, mainly when dealing with the edge of platforms.  There are times where I can walk farther off a platform than I should be able to – which can cause problems trying to get to an area below it – and there are times where artificial barriers are too obvious.

Diamonds, Hearts... And A Mushroom?

The biggest problem, however, lies in level layout and variety.  The levels are pretty boring and linear.  There are a couple of hidden things and a few places that you have to backtrack to get to, but that’s about it.  Even platforms are no more advanced than moving up and down.  There are maybe half a dozen enemy types, and aside from the slightly aggressive bats, all of them just move back and forth in small areas, hoping you’ll eventually run into them.  I haven’t even encountered a boss fight yet, and I’m not sure that there are any.

The visuals are actually much better than the original.  The style is more consistent among all the designs, and the main character has some decent animation.  The backdrops are actually fairly detailed, and the ones when you get to the end are especially nifty.  The evil critters could still use some more movement, but Dark Woods was much more pleasant to look at than Mystical Woods.

A Slide

One thing that originally attracted me to the series was the comparison to the old Sega game Castle Of Illusion, and that is most evident in the sound effects.  In fact, some of them sound very familiar (from what I can remember anyway).  The music is quite good, but that’s to be expected given the author is Kevin MacLeod.  I do appreciate the fact that BeanSprites chose some of his work that actually hasn’t appeared in 50 other iPhone games.

At the very end of the game I got a level that had disappearing platforms, and there was a final boss fight.  Sadly, this is too little too late.  I’m happy to see some marked improvements in the series, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes cream of the crop.  I hope BeanSprites continues to refine the Woods saga, but I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that the next iteration is a 100x better in quality, not just 10x like the difference between the first two.  Unfortunately, between the lackluster game play and the fact that the entire journey can be completed in about 15 minutes, I have to say…

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
App Store Link
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

The Actor's Dichotomy

The premise behind Burn The Rope is that each level has a shape made out of ropes, and you must set the ropes on fire and burn away as much of the shape as you can before the flames go out.  Like many puzzle games these days there are three levels to medals you can receive: bronze, silver and gold.  These levels are based solely on the amount of rope you burn away.  You can unlock the next level at a given location simply by earning a bronze medal on the highest unlocked level at that location.  Once you get into the game, however, you’ll find yourself drawn towards trying to earn the gold on each level.  It’s great for replayability.

To begin a level you just tap somewhere along the rope in order to ignite a flame.  As long as there is rope to burn the flame will stay lit… as long as your device is rotated in the direction the flame is pointing.  That’s the trick to Burn The Rope – you’re constantly rotating your device to make sure all of your flames stay moving.  It doesn’t take long for a flame to burn out, either, so if you need to focus on a particular flame make sure it’s the one that can do the most damage.  After a number of levels I’m still trying to get used to the whole thing myself, but I can give you one bit of advice: don’t try playing this with any kind of cables plugged in unless you want to get cords tangled!

A Firey Story

As you would expect, the further you get into the game the more complex things get.  The shapes get more detailed, providing several paths that can all be alight at the same time.  Eventually you get introduced to bugs that cause the flames to change colors when they collide.  If a segment of rope is a certain color, it can only be burned by flames of the same color.  There are also bugs that explode when burned.  And just wait until they turn the lights out!  These are just some of the things you’ll encounter in the first set of levels, and the game in its current incarnation has three areas to explore.

The visuals are pretty decent in Burn The Rope.  Fire is almost always cool in the electronic world, and they’ve done a good job with the flame effects.  The bugs themselves look like bugs, so mission accomplished.  Probably the best part of the graphics is the dancing flames on the end of level screen.

Lots Of Circles

The sound works well enough, though the bugs sound kind of odd when they get riled up.  The flames and explosions and such are all pretty much on target.  There’s a voice every once in a while that says things like “right on” and “oh yeah” that’s pretty amusing.  The music is fun to listen to, though it will get repetitive quickly if you’re just sitting and listening to it without actually playing the game.  It seems like there were more vocals in the title screen on the first version of the game, and I don’t know why they would have cut back on that.

If you are any kind of puzzle game addict you need to add Burn The Rope to your collection.  It’s every bit as entertaining as all those OTHER popular puzzle games, and it is different than anything you’ve probably played on your iPhone up until this point.  Besides, how often do you get to safely play with fire?

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

Don't Get Crabby

While the mechanics are the same, you get to choose between three different game play modes.  Campaign mode lets you tour 8 different worlds in an attempt to recover parts of the “ultimate artifact” and I suppose defeat some evil boss.  In Endless mode you can pick any of the worlds that you’ve beaten in Campaign mode and explore them, well, endlessly until you die.  Super Endless mode is a random mish-mash, picking backgrounds and characters from every level and combining them into a mode.  In general I’m not a fan of endless modes anyway, but the only redeeming factor to this one in my opinion is you get a sneak peak of creatures you might not have run across yet in Campaign mode.

In reality you get your choice of playing the knight, a barbarian or an archer (though I must say I don’t ever recall an archer wielding dual sickles before).  Unless you’re playing Super Endless mode you choose your “hero”, and then choose which world you’d like to play – any of the 8 when playing Campaign mode or any unlocked one in Endless mode.  Every world is comprised of several areas where you’ll fight off hordes of monsters, collecting experience, health potions, spells and coins.  Spells are “use ‘em or lose ‘em”, as you only have one spell slot and if you run over another spell your current one automatically gets replaced.  Don’t waste them, but don’t hoard them either.  Health obviously keeps you alive, and I’m not sure what the coins do yet.

I Got A Big Hammer

When you earn enough experience you’ll go up a level, at which point you’ll get to give your character skills and perks.  Skills are things like additional strength and special moves.  Interestingly enough, Perks can also be special abilities, and also enhancements to your other abilities.  I’m not really sure what the true difference is between skills and perks, but I do know that while a good number of them stay the same between characters, there are some in each category that are different for each character type.  Also, each skill and perk has 5 levels, so there are plenty of different customization combinations to ensure that every game you play feels different.

Speaking of different, I’m amazed at all the different creatures that populate the land.  Unlike so many games where a different world means different colored versions of the same creatures, each world in Knight’s Rush has a lot of newness to offer.  That doesn’t mean things won’t overlap, but you never feel like you’re getting gypped in the bestiary department.  Sure you have your stock knights (both foot soldiers and the kind that ride horses), and your standard mages that cast spells.  But then you start getting more exotic things like walking plants that suck you towards them or vicious killer sand crabs.  Also, unless you’re playing Super Endless mode, the creatures fit quite well with the world themes they populate.

The Warehouse District

Graphically, this might be the best installment of the Knights series yet.  In some cases there are multiple scrolling background levels, but even if there’s just one background everything is finely detailed.  When you travel between different locales like a forest or desert you really feel like you’re in different places.  The character designs are quite well done and incredibly diverse, especially when it comes to non-humanoid type creatures.  As for the animation, it can tend to get a bit over the top at times.  I pretty sure when I’m done pounding a crate more wood has been thrown around than was originally used to build the crate!  I wouldn’t want it any other way, though, as it just adds to the charm of the visuals.

The audio is as diverse as the visuals.  Wooden equipment creaks as it rolls by.  Different projectiles make different noises as they wiz through the air.  In fact, pretty much everything makes a unique noise in this game.  It’s such a refreshing change of pace from the usual “one noise fits all” mentality for sound effects.  The music is quite epic when you sit and listen to it apart from the game, and makes for a nice backdrop while you’re playing.  The tune actually changes as you travel to different parts of the same world, though I’m not sure if there is separate music for each world or not.  Whatever the case, the audio and visuals does an incredible job of making the Knights world come to life.

Cannon Go Boom

Don’t let the hack ‘n slash exterior fool you.  There’s quite a game to be had here.  In depth character customization, a vibrant world and frantic game play all make for a compelling reason to play.  In the end, though, it’s all the little details that will suck you in and keep you coming back.  And, once you’ve completed the story mode Knights’ Rush can become your very own “endless running” game with Super Endless mode.  The game has plenty to offer, and is really quite a bargain for the price.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

A Green Pirate Monkey

You start the game out as Sam, and your objective is simply to keep running, shooting everything evil that crosses your path.  You don’t control the running, so all you have to worry about it tapping to jump (tapping twice will double jump) and tapping somewhere else to shoot.  Ammunition is unlimited, though you only get one type of gun to play with.  On the other hand, what’s not unlimited is your air supply, hence the title of the game.  You start out with 8 units of air which slowly get used up.  Along the way you can pick up units of air, and if you’re real lucky you’ll get a tank that will fill up your air supply.  If you get hit by enemies or their weapons you’ll lose air as well.  When the supply is gone, so are you.

In addition to units of air you can also pick up shields, which will temporarily protect you from anything on the screen.  There are “slow down” items as well, though, they don’t really seem to do all that much.  Finally, there are stars that you can collect along the way.  Stars are important because they allow you to unlock additional characters to play with.  Collecting air, in addition to keeping you alive, will help you unlock different musical tracks.  The number of kills both increases your rank and unlocks various color schemes (and by “schemes” I mean changing from one basic color to another), and your mileage run will unlock different stages in the game.  This is the toughest one, because you have to put in a lot of distance to unlock new levels.

Orange You Glad It's A T-Rex?

I’m not normally a fan of games that make such heavy use of unlockable items, but in this scenario it actually works quite nicely.  I will say, however, that it gets frustrating sometimes when I run through whole levels without ever seeing a star.  Also, there are times where it seems like I get hit even though it doesn’t look like I actually touched anything.  I assume it’s a collision problem, but it can still be annoying, especially when my air is low.  The next thing I’d like to see is the ability to switch options without going back to the main menu and pressing start.  That may not be possible, but if so it would be nice.  Finally, something explaining the differences between characters would be nice.  I can guess with the two I’ve got available so far, but seeing it spelled out is always a benefit.

The graphics in Air Supply are deliciously retro.  And I’m not talking about that garbage where people draw really poor graphics and call it “old school”.  It’s clear that a lot of effort was put into making the graphics look like they belong on a pre-NES console.  What it proves to me is that such graphics could actually look pretty cool!  I also love how everything is silhouettes and lines so that you can actually have a setting that changes the color.  Genius!  The only issue I’ve had so far is that the alien city theme, which is the first theme you unlock, is kind of hard on my eyes.  It still looks cool but it is just hard to stare at after a while.

UFOs Are Not Your Friend

The music is a bit more upscale, weighing in at roughly the NES era of consoles and computing.  As you collect air units you’ll be able to unlock different tracks, and so far every one (I have 4 available) has been enjoyable.  The sound effects also have a retro feel to them, which isn’t nearly as impressive, but with the cool music, who cares about the sound effects?

The bottom line is that this game rocks!  As it is I’ve become strangely drawn to this genre of game, but Air Supply has kicked my obsession to a new level.  I love the look, I love the music, and I love trying to unlock all the unlockables.  There are a few minor things I’d like to see get cleaned up as I mentioned previously, but those items in no way hamper my enjoyment of the game.  If you do not own this gem yet, go out and buy it now.  Long develop Quantum Sheep!

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Guess Who's Dinner?

In Clumsy Bob you play the eponymous Bob, a happy go lucky purple elephant that just loves to bounce on clouds.  The problem is that things just don’t seem to have a habit of going your way, and there are lots of opportunities for you to cease bouncing merrily along.  It’s your job to keep the cute little pachyderm’s dreams alive as long as possible.  To control Bob you simply tilt the device left and right.  While jumping or floating this will literally cause Bob to move left and right. When you’re flying the rocket, however, tilting left and right will cause the rocket to go up and down, respectively.

Along the way you’ll get plenty of aids to help keep you going.  Springs will launch you farther than a normal jump.  Umbrellas will cause you to float to a landing, which gives you better control and potentially allows you to travel farther than jumping as well.  The aforementioned rocket lets you travel really far, though you might have to dodge some oncoming missiles during your trip.  There are also coins you can collect to boost your score.

Better Than A Jet

Besides the counter-missiles, there are hungry rats just waiting to get a taste of Bob.  Who doesn’t love a rodent that can consume an entire elephant?  There are also snakes that will attempt to gobble you up, and clouds that disappear after one bounce.  And naturally you can simply plummet to your doom with a badly timed jump.  The worst offender, however, is the crashing problem.  The longest I’ve been able to play Clumsy Bob without crashing is 15 minutes, but after playing a few other games that time frame drops drastically to between 3 and 5 minutes.  Seeing as I can run Dead Space for an hour with no issues, I think the developers need to tweak things a bit.  This is on an iPod Touch 4G, by the way.

In addition to addictive game play, the game sports Crystal integration.  There are a number of achievements you can work towards, and of course there are the whole leader board and challenge aspects that go along with the Crystal experience.  I understand the need to use Crystal since this is a Clickgamer game, but either offer me another social solution as well or please finally get around to fixing the problem where I have to log in every time I want to use Crystal.

Floating Along

The graphics are great.  Everything is colorful and well animated, and I love watching the rat eat Bob (not that I don’t want to see Bob succeed, mind you). The backgrounds are also pretty nifty, especially the one that has all the sea creatures in it.  The sound effects are amusing, especially when it comes to the noises Bob makes.  Certainly not something you’d expect from an elephant.  The music sounds good and is very upbeat, which just enhances the frivolous mood the game emits.  Aesthetically the game is quite pleasing.

Clumsy Bob has all the ingredients of a great distance game, and in fact is a nice change of pace from the norm in this genre.  It also has a very inviting atmosphere.  Unfortunately, until they get the crashing problem fixed it’s really frustrating wondering when the game’s just going to dump out on you.  Please get this fixed soon guys!  Until then, I can’t outright recommend this game.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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The basic premise is that you must fire a monkey head out of a cannon and try to get it into the goal on the level.  That’s all you HAVE to do, but there are three bananas you can collect as well.  Of course you’re only really cool if you get all three bananas on every level.  There are 25 levels altogether, and so far I have 73 bananas.  Sadly, I’m not sure I have the skills to get the remaining to.  Guess I still have something else to do in the game yet!

Level 25

To fire the cannon you simply tap it.  The only other time you can interact with the game is if your monkey gets trapped in a bubble.  When you want the monkey out of the bubble you simply tap the bubble to pop it.  Other obstacles include boards and pegs that slide and spin and mini-mazes.  There isn’t a lot of variety to the types of obstacles, but the levels are so well designed that it doesn’t matter.  For some reason when I play this game I’m reminded of Donkey Kong Country… but I digress.

So what are my complaints?  As I said at the beginning, the main thing is length.  As I’ve been writing this review I continued to play the game, and now I’ve managed to get the remaining two bananas. There’s no replay value to the game, so now I just have to move on.  The bubbles are a bit hard to tap and pop in a timely fashion.  Also, there is a reset button that appears on the cannon, but it doesn’t always appear and I’m not sure what triggers it.  That might as well show up right after you’ve launched your monkey and just stay there so you can reset a level at any time.  Of course, these are all minor things, but things to think about none the less.

Level 13

The graphics are simple but get the job done.  A bodiless monkey is a bit freaky at first, but you get used to it.  There are really no special effects to speak of, though a little pomp and circumstance when you’ve gotten the last banana would be cool.  The sound effects aren’t bad, and there’s some nice music playing in the background, but it’s clear that the focus of the game was actual game play, and not aesthetics.  As long as its not horrid to look at or listen to, that’s okay for a free game.

In the end what we have is an extremely fun puzzle game that ends way too abruptly.  With some more levels, additional obstacles, and a couple more monkeys (don’t need abilities, just different faces), this could be quite a contender.  As it is the game is still excellent for killing a few minutes until you finish it.  Even if the result ends up costing money, let’s hope the developer expands this into the product it should be.  This is one of the most entertaining puzzle games I’ve played in quite a while, and with the right polish I believe it could give some of the heavy hitters a run for their money.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

C'mon And Kiss Me

This game is all about you, under the guidance of a professor that happens to be a spoon, saving the cosmos from some rotten alien eggs.  Affectionately described as a “tap’n crack” game, all you basically do is tap the bad eggs as they fly towards the screen at you.  Just tap the bad eggs, however.  Don’t tap the really bad eggs.  Tapping the really bad eggs is bad… really.  You can tell the “just plain bad” eggs because they look like rejects from a bad installment of the Police Academy movies.  The “really bad” eggs will cause the screen to flip or shake, making it hard for you to tap the eggs you need to tap, or they can even cause you to lose a life.

At the end of every three stages there’s a big “just plain bad” boss.  This boss must be tapped several times to be defeated, but when it’s red it will spit at you.  Just tap the spit at this point, because the only thing worse than egg on your face is egg spit on your face.  When the boss is red it can’t be tapped.  Basically you just keep going until you can’t go no more, which probably means you’re dead.  You start the game with three lives, and you can earn an extra life for every sausage link or piece of toast you tap.  Any time anything bad hits you, or you accidentally tap the “really bad” egg with the skull and crossbones on it, you lose a life.

Christmas In The Stars

There’s also a “bonus” Christmas Eggs In Space mini-game, but let’s call it what it is: level 1 with a Christmas skin.  Still, it is fun until you beat the snowman egg (the first and only boss).  My main gripe about the game is that because of the layering of the objects and the frequency of their arrival at times, it’s nearly impossible to tap the right eggs unless your fingertip is the size of a stylus.  Mine is about the thickness of 10.  As a result you need to wait for the “really bad” eggs to clear, at which point it’s too late to tap the “just plain” bad eggs.  Annoying, but in the end it’s livable.

The graphics are rather amusing in Eggs In Space.  From the old fashioned TV like interface to the dropping curtain between acts there’s this whole vaudeville / variety hour feel to the game.  The professor spoon is great, and the individual eggs are quite enjoyable.  Even the backgrounds are nifty, whether it’s the big lipped planet or the world with a huge pirate ship embedded in it.  I could just as easily see this game having a cartoon based off of it as Angry Birds.

50's Sci-Fi Reborn?

I’m actually a bit disappointed in the sound.  It’s not quite as zany as the graphics, and doesn’t do as much to enhance the experience as I’d hoped it would.  I’m also sad that we never actually get a voice for professor spoon.  The music is kind of the same way, though I do like the little piano riff that plays between levels.  I wouldn’t recommend letting that play for too long, though, as it gets repetitive rather quickly.

Overall, Eggs In Space is a great time waster.  If you’re looking for a deep, meaningful gaming experience, get a real life partner instead.  If you want plenty of level and lots of variety, I hear there’s this quirky little puzzle game called Angry Birds.  For simple, banal incredible edible smashing fun, Eggs In Space is the game for you.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

Let It Snow...

Just like any other whack-a-mole type game you’ll have levels full of creatures that have nothing better to do than pop out of various places, and it’s your job to whack them.  Why this is so imperative I have no idea, but without it there’d be absolutely no point to the game.  What’s cool – and also adds to the difficulty – is that on each level there is an animal that is off limits.  For each correct animal you tap without missing any or hitting the “bad” one you’ll build up a combo.  Once you do something lame the combo starts over again.  My highest combo so far is in the mid 40s somewhere, almost like my age.

Each level gives you a certain amount of time to whack critters.  You can keep going until you lose all your lives.  You start out with 5 hearts, and each time you tap a taboo critter you lose a heart.  I think you can also lose hearts by missing a good animal, but that doesn’t always seem to be the case and I haven’t really confirmed it yet.  Thankfully there are also ways to gain hearts, so don’t think you’ll be left out in the cold on that department.  Occasionally items will float by on balloons.  To actually get the items you have to tap on them – if you just pop the balloons you won’t get the item the balloon was carrying.

It's A Gorilla!

What I really like about the game is that it doesn’t use boring stereotypical landscapes that most whack-a-mole type games use.  Level one is a park, level two is an airplane, and level 3 takes you all the way to the moon.  This is just a sampling of what you can expect.  Beyond the constant location changes, however, are the obstacles that come with each level.  On the airplane level you actually have clouds passing by that obscure your view.  In levels 3 and 4 there are bosses that you must tap multiple times to defeat (recall the gorilla comment from the intro).  I imagine the trend continues past level 4, but I’ve only managed to get there once and I don’t remember what it was like.

Once a level you get the chance to go into fever mode if you can tap the star that floats by on one of the balloons.  This mode makes the animals come out faster and gives you more points, but it stops when you miss an animal or hit the taboo animal.  After every couple of rounds you play a bonus stage where you simply tap all of the bubbles that float onto the screen.  The round ends when the time is up or you a bubble floats off the screen.  There’s even a special stage you can unlock called 199x mode, but in this mode you only get one heart, and it personally challenges me too much (read – I stink at it).

Bonus Round

The graphics look like they came straight off an EGA screen, back in the days when the Commodore 64 reigned supreme (or at least existed).  If you understood that last sentence, then thank you.  What it boils down to is that the visuals have a great old school look to them, but probably won’t appeal to those who think 2D as a whole is ancient history.  There’s a Christmas theme that adds snow into the mix, which as a general rule I like but I this case can make things hard to see.  I also find the fever mode very taxing on my eyes with all the flashing.  Overall I do like the visual style, though.

I think the sound effects are there mainly for the sake of having sound effects.  That’s all right, because the music more than makes up for it.  To relate to some of the “newer” older gamers, the score sounds like it was ripped from the NES.  The main theme is lots of fun, the Christmas theme is a nice twist on a classic song, and the bonus levels have their own music as well.

Bubble Pets is a wonderful casual game.  The graphics are great in their old school glory, the music has a charm to it that can’t be captured with full blown orchestras, and the game play is simple, frantic and addictive.  You won’t find a lot of flash here, but you will get plenty of entertainment for your money.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

Duct Tape IS Good For Everything

The first thing you’ll note is that there aren’t any 2D pixel art graphics or 3D rendered images to be found.  These are videos of real people.  This was a fad in the mid 90’s called Full Motion Video (FMV), and it’s too bad these guys weren’t around to guide the pioneers of this type of visual display along.  We might have seen a lot more quality FMV projects back then.  The video is quite well done, and does a wonderful job of capturing the feel of a B-movie horror / slasher flick.  Some of the camera angles in particular make things that wouldn’t normally be so scary quite intense.

The sound is also remarkable.  The beating of your heart, the screeches when you see the stalker or have flashbacks: they all lend a great sense of foreboding to the game.  I’d comment on the music as well, but to be perfectly honest I don’t really recall what the music was like, or if there even was any.  What’s so amazing about that is I literally finished the game again just 10 minutes or so before writing this review.  That’s how engrossed I was in the game itself.

What To Do?

As far as your interaction with the game, it kind of plays like a cross between a Choose Your Own Adventure game and Dragon’s Lair.  You’ll often be presented with simple options like “turn left” or “turn right”.  In a couple of spots you’ll need to “move the action along” by tapping certain spots on the screen whenever a hand appears.  As these sequences get more intense the hands show up more frequently, and one missed tap will send you back to the beginning of the sequence.  That’s the one down side to the game – certain decisions sets are bundled up into longer sequences, which means one wrong answer might have you revisiting several decisions.

There’s no dialog in the game, and in the first chapter the story is a bit vague.  However, all that really does is add to the mystery of what’s going on, which is how a good horror story should play out.  I know I was pretty stoked for part 2 by the time I finished the first one.  The game is not all that long when played straight through, but chances are good you won’t make all the right decisions the first time around.  Either way it’s worth the investment.

What Is "Project H"?

It’s games like this that make the phrase “short but sweet” ring true.  The video is well shot, the story (what little you get of it) is intriguing, and there’s just enough action and decision points to make you feel like part of the “movie”.  If you can snag this for free it’s a no-brainer, but even when it returns to 99 cents it’s totally worth giving up a soda or cup of coffee for.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Related Links: Hysteria Project 2 Teaser Trailer

Join The Club

You start the game as a fledging monster, with but a few gold coins your name and the desire to wreak havoc across the land.  Initially you’ll just get to torture the population with basic hitting moves.  As you progress through the game you’ll start to evolve and learn new skills, and eventually get a stomp move, flaming breath, and other nifty tricks.  Some are generic and some are dependent on your evolutionary “chasis”.

As you gain experience you’ll unlock new base creature types that you can evolve into.  Each type comes with a unique stomp move and special attack.  Plus, they all look different.  You’ll be able to mix and match things like eyes and hands, but it’s the body selection that gives you a particular power.  You’ll also get to buy things like weapons, armor and hats to improve stats like attack, defense and speed.  Keep in mind that all equipment effects all stats, so don’t choose something just because it looks cool.

I Need A Hat

Throughout the levels there will be items you can pick up to help you defeat the good guys.  Things like cows, poison barrels and exploding robot princesses do some decent damage as you pick them up and roll them through the crowds.  Should you happen across a real princess you’ll definitely want to scoop her up – that’s how you recover your health.  You may not finish a level the first time through, but you get to keep any gold you’ve earned for the level and you can continue the level from where you left off.  Or, you can go back to a previous level to earn more money and try and level up.

The levels are full of good guys just trying to make sure you have a bad day.  You start out with your typical knights and archers.  As you progress you’ll start getting things like ninjas and cannons, and my personal favorite so far, the guy that looks suspiciously like a Link knock-off.  Each has a slightly different means of attack – some long range, some short range and a couple with both.  In the end, however, they’re all going to do everything they can to hit you as much as they can.

Where'd The Big Monster Go?

The controls are easy to understand but not always easy to execute.  To move left or right you touch and hold the respective side of the screen where you want to move.  To attack you tap the screen, and to do a power attack you swipe horizontally towards the side of the screen you wish to attack.  To dodge you swipe from top to bottom, and to pick things up you swipe from bottom to top.  The problem I have with swiping motions in general when it comes to games is that it tends to prevent you from getting any sort of rhythm or flow.  It will be interesting to see how the D-pad option in their next update alters the game play.

The graphics in Wackylands are wonderful.  Everything is bright and colorful and finely detailed, and the animation is pretty decent as well.  I love the little touches like furniture on the lawn or UFOs in the background beaming up stuff.  The variety of different accessories is also neat.  It’s fun to swap out weapons or armor or even creature types and see how it affects your creation.  The cutscenes are great as well, capturing the “look what my kid drew” style that every parent knows oh so well.

Have Fun Stormin' The Castle

The sound effects are good, but there’s too much repetition.  Noises like the knights make when they are running are classic Saturday morning cartoon sounds, and the screams when people get lit on fire are hilarious.  Every single character makes the same noise, however, which is pretty disappointing given the range of adversaries you face.  It’s obviously not crucial to game play, but distinct sounds make the world seem more alive.  The music is decent, but it’s pretty standard fantasy fare.  The truth is that you won’t notice it that much when the action gets hectic anyway.

Wackylands Boss is a nice twist on the traditional side scrolling action game.  I’m not sure that there’s really innovation in mechanics or anything like that, but it is fun being the big, bad boss.  Not to mention the fact that it’s the rare game where you can play dress-up and still feel like a man!  The graphics are top notch, the sound is amusing, and the creature evolution is pretty neat.  This is just another notch in Chillingo’s ever lengthening belt of App Store hits.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

It Slices And Dices

The game has no story and no help, so I guess you just have to assume that the guys you’re shooting are bad and that’s why you’re shooting them.  The format is certainly old school – shoot a bunch of minions, collect various weapon power ups, and ultimately face the boss on each level.  Power ups range from ninja stars to cool bolts of lightning, and if you collect three stars your ship temporarily transforms and you get nifty, powerful guns.  All power ups wear off eventually and there are no “levels” to a particular weapon, but enough power up capsules plummet towards you that you should almost always have a special weapon of some sort.

If you get hit by enemy fire you lose some health, which starts at 100 and drops to 0.  When your health gets to 0 it is game over.  You can pick up health capsules from time to time, but they generally aren’t worth the risk if they’re surrounded by gunfire.  You’ll mostly likely take as much damage as you get back from recovering the capsule.  There is another way you can die as well (I think), but I have as yet to figure out what’s causing it.  All I know is that sometimes I seem to all of a sudden perish even though I still had health left.  I’m not sure if it’s because getting hit by an alien is instant death or what, but it does happen from time to time.

There’s a nice variety of aliens visually, but other than the fact that some shoot and others don’t, there’s not much difference between them in how they act.  They move in basic patterns either back and forth (the shooters) or heading down towards you.  What gets you is when you have a bunch headed towards you so you can’t deal with the ones at the top that are shooting at you.  You are stuck at the bottom and can only move back and forth via tilt control, and firing is automatically done for you.  Consequently, you don’t even really feel like you’re participating all that much in the game.

Electrifying Personality

Super Blast 2 supports both OpenFeint and Game Center for leader boards, and at least OpenFeint for achievements (I haven’t checked Game Center yet on this front).  There are only 10 achievements in OpenFeint, but it appears that at the rate I’m going it’s still going to take me a while to earn them all.  Don’t even get me started on how poorly I’m ranking on the leader boards so far…

On the plus side, the graphics are very nice indeed.  The backgrounds are detailed and have a nice range from jungle all the way to outer space.  Some of the weapons wield some pretty cool special effects.  As for the ships themselves, they actually look pretty slick as well.  Definitely not your typical vertically scrolling shooter style ship designs.  I will say that they remind me somewhat of mechanized versions of Bloomies!

The sound effects are pretty typical for this sort of game.  There are voiceovers once in a while that aren’t too bad.  I especially like the one in the beginning that says “prepare to fight” – it kind of reminds me of Killer Instinct or Mortal Kombat.  The music is well orchestrated and conveys a nice sense of urgency and adrenaline.  There are at least two different themes that I’ve picked up on so far, and I’d imagine that if there are others they probably sound cool too.

In the end it feels like Super Blast 2 was designed to cater to the same folks that play Bloomies, and I’m not sure that was the right move.  The game is very simplified as far as scrolling shooters go.  Given the excellent competition that exists for this genre on the App Store, I’m not sure what place Super Blast 2 will hold in months to come.  It’s not a bad game, it just doesn’t offer the same challenges and features that its opponents do, and there’s nothing here that you haven’t seen before.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

• Rail Adventures
• Arctic Shuffle 2
• Gas Tycoon
• Imp or Oaf
• Digit Defenders
• Retro Fighter
• Gold Miner Joe
• Ten Pin Championship Bowling
• Starball
• Skee-Ball
• Watermelon!

February

• Dead Man’s Dungeon
• iGuardian
• APPDOPE Website
• Hellkid
• Twice!
• Daisy Mae’s Alien Buffet
• Radial 50
• Arachnadoodle
• Thumpies
• Meltdown – Radioactive Platformer
• Slugwars

March

• Tilt To Live
• Boardwalk Games
• Fly-Flap
• Flu Fighter
• Spirit
• Trap Master
• Glade

April

• Guess The News
• Birdie in Trouble
• The Simpsons Arcade
• Fruit Ninja

May

• Comet Racer
• Equilibrio
• Tap Tap Balloon
• Hand Of Greed
• 180
• Virus Laboratory

June

• Up With A fish
• Color Swing
• Fastball 2
• Babeorella
• iSlice Cut it Up!

July

• Steamballs
• Police Range
• OddBlob
• Golvellius
• Jump-O-Mania 3D

August

• Chuck Gnome
• Pig Vs Wolves
• Lorax Garden
• Monster Dash

September

• Jewels Maker
• Vampire Origins
• Dungeon Core
• Tappi Bear All In One

October

• Secret Of Grisly Manor
• Dice Tower
• Drop Dead

November

• mScribble
• Vikings Row!

December

• Go Usagi
• Clock Blocks
• Song Shaker

Year 2010 has been a very strong year for games for the iPhone. A good variety with creative graphics and sound, Hope 2011 continues to bring more creativity and innovation to the iPhone gaming martketplace.

The premise is simple – pick a song and shake the device to play the song.  It sounds easy enough, except that getting the rhythm down can be tricky, even if it’s a song you know intimately.  This is the reason I’m not keen on games that use shaking the device as a play mechanic.  It seems that sometimes the device will register a shake as two movements instead of one, and other times it doesn’t seem to register the shake at all, both of which will throw your rhythm off.  Add to that the fact that sometimes the songs might not be played quite like what you’re used to, and it can be a bit daunting trying to match the tune.  Fortunately you can listen to the song in full before you try anything, but there are a couple of songs I won’t even attempt.

Pretty Lights...

On the plus side, it’s easy to get excited when you “shake” a song well enough to earn a Fantastic and four stars.  The star concept is nice, but I think it needs to be fleshed out a bit, because right now you earn stars every time you complete a song, even if your most recent attempt was worse than your previous one.  Also, there’s no indication on an individual song what the maximum number of stars is you’ve earned for that song.  I guess at this point it doesn’t matter, but I think it could make things a bit more interesting if the stars actually did make some kind of difference.

The interface as a whole could stand to be cleaned up a bit.  When I’m playing a song, it would be nice if it said at the top of the screen what song I’m playing (that way if I’m really bad I at least know what my goal is supposed to be).  A “reset song” option would be nice as well.  If I’m in albums mode, hitting “home” when playing a song should take me back to the list of songs for that album, not the list of albums.  Finally, showing the max number of stars earned for a given song in the list would be nice, so I’d at least know which songs I’ve already done.

The visuals are pretty basic, but given the fact that you spend most of the time shaking the device you really don’t need much.  The interface for selecting songs is actually kind of cool, with a bit of a jukebox feel to it.  While actually playing a song you just get flashes of light, but once again, what else do you really need?

The only real “sound effects” are the clapping or booing depending on how well you do with the song.  Of course the main draw where the audio is concerned is the songs themselves.  For the most part I like the renditions of the various songs they perform, though a couple of them don’t sound quite right to me.  There were also a couple that I wasn’t real familiar with or had never heard at all, but we’ll just consider that a cultural experience!

This game has so much potential.  It’s a unique experience and would be entertaining to share with your friends.  I just really think they need to work on the shake mechanism a bit more.  I realize that part of the problem could be I’m just not very good at it, but I don’t think that’s the case.  I just think that depending on the song, the game has a hard time dealing with the rhythm in certain spots.  That can get real frustrating when you think you’re doing so well and suddenly you hear a bunch of notes strung together too quickly, or when you’re sure you shook the device yet no sound came out.  I wouldn’t necessarily shy away from the game, but the more fickle users will get aggravated with this issue.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

The objective of the game is simple – the screen is filled with block shaped clocks, and you need to clear them all off the screen in one chain reaction.  A bullet will strike one of the clocks on the left side of the screen, and you have until the clock’s hand travels a full revolution around the clock face to tap the screen and send the bullet to the next clock.  As long as you keep hitting clocks you keep going.  If you miss a clock you have to start the level over.  If a clock makes a full revolution you have to start the level over.

The game is all about timing and reflexes.  Not every clock moves at the same speed, nor is every clock the same size.  In quest and survival modes the clocks will be in different configurations on the screen, and in survival mode once a clock disappears another clock randomly appears somewhere else.  As a result there is no single strategy for beating a given level in a given game play mode.  When you’re playing one of the modes where the clocks stay away once they’ve been struck, it’s often a matter of luck hitting the final clock in the chain.

Clock Blocks has 3 game play modes.  In Quest mode you have to defeat 40 levels of increasingly complex combinations of clocks.  There’s no difficulty setting on this one, and thankfully you can always pick up at the first level you haven’t yet completed.  When playing survival mode you simply must keep going until you miss a clock.  Every time you shoot a clock another one will appear somewhere else, and the difficulty settings determine the size of the clocks, their spacing, and how quickly the hands revolve.  Finally there’s classic mode, which fills the screen with clocks and keeps a tally of the number of times you can completely clear a screen.  Again difficulty settings determine the size and speed of the clocks, though here the configuration is always nicely lined rows and columns.

This is one of the rare puzzle games where I actually enjoy all three game play modes.  Usually I tend to gravitate more towards the quest type modes, and while that’s still my favorite here, it’s easy to jump into the other modes for a couple of rounds of play.

Visually the game takes a minimalist approach, and it actually suits the game quite well.  There really aren’t any special effects in the game, and the smiley face when you beat a level or frowny face when you lose a level are actually kind of silly.  I do like the fact that as the active clock gets a shadow around it as your time runs out.  The sound effects are just as basic.  I am quite impressed with the music.  Each mode has its own theme, and they’re all pretty nice to listen to.

If you’re looking for a nice diversion between bouts of Cut The Rope or Angry Birds, Clock Blocks is just the game to fit the bill.  The concept is almost absurdly simple, the control is a piece of cake, and yet as the game gets rolling it can get quite challenging.  If you’re into pomp and circumstance you might be a bit disappointed by the lack of frills, but as far as I’m concerned the core game play more than makes up for it.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

Redroom, Redroom!

Apparently a certain breed of rabbits called Usagi make a delicacy known as Mochi that aliens happen to crave.  The aliens traveled to Earth seeking the Mochi and will do everything they can, including killing the Usagi, to get it.  You don’t want to let that happen, so you need to help the rabbits escape the clutches of the nasty aliens.  It’s not just the aliens that will try and stop you either.  The levels are littered with walls that get in your way.  Then there are the lava pits that don’t treat the bunnies very well.  And don’t get me started on the switches – red to lower red blocks, and green to lower green blocks… but they raise the opposite color blocks as well…

There’s one other issue with this whole setup.  No one can seem to sit still!  The rabbits and aliens are constantly moving, and only stop when they run into objects or find the exit.  If an alien catches a rabbit, the level’s over.  If an alien gets to the exit before all the rabbits, the level is over.  And, if a rabbit falls into some lava the level is over.  The weird thing is that rabbits will always turn right when they hit a wall, and aliens will always turn left.  Thankfully you can use this to your advantage.

I'm so blue...

On each level you get several tiles with arrows on them.  All you have to do is drag a tile from the toolbox on the right side of the screen to where you want to place it in the level.  If it doesn’t work for you, drag it someplace else or drag it back to the toolbox.  I don’t know how well it would work, but one nice option might be the ability to double tap to put an arrow tile back.  Anyway, once you’ve placed all the arrows you want to use, tap Go and see what happens.  Thankfully you can replay a level as many times as you need to, and the game leaves the arrows in place between attempts, so you always have some point of reference to start from.

The key to this game is observation.  Before long you’ll find yourself watching how the level plays out before you’ve even placed your first arrow.  Then, even when you know the arrows don’t work where you’ve got them, you’ll still watch the same setup 3 or 4 times to see where you might adjust it.  If you just want to complete the game you might not need to be so thorough, but if you want to attempt to earn 3 stars on each level you’ll probably be doing this a lot.  You can complete a level with no stars if you just want to unlock the next level, but stars are based on the number of arrows used – the less arrows, the more stars you can earn.  For the average gamer you’ll find yourself replaying a level quite a few times to earn 3 stars.

Title Screen

The graphics are decent, if nothing overly exciting.  The rabbits and aliens look good, and the background for the most part is okay, but the pseudo-3D nature of the walls sometimes makes it hard to figure out where all the tiles are in crowded levels.  Also, since the exit is black and so are the tops of walls, actually deciding which tile is the exit can be tricky on occasion.  I do really like the title screen, which makes me wish there were a few cut scenes in the game.  There really isn’t a whole lot in the way of sound effects, and the music is enjoyable, though I’m not sure it fits with the game.  However, I’m willing to let that slide as I’ve become quite the fan of Kevin MacLeod’s work.

Overall this is a nice little puzzle game.  For hardcore puzzlers it might be a bit easy, especially since it only has 36 levels, but for the average gamer I think you’ll get plenty of play time out of it.  The game could use a bit more pizzazz, but being as it’s a puzzle game that doesn’t bother me too much.  It’s nice to play something that’s not a physics puzzler or some match 3 variant.  I’d definitely suggest giving this a try if you’re in the market for something a little different.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

Quick Looks link: [All About Quick Looks]

Bose l1 Compact System

The Bose L1 Compact System is another one of these accessories that fall into the price range that makes it difficult for the average musical keyboard buyer. The speakers cost $899.00 USD which can easily be more than the home user can afford on top of the purchase of the musical keyboard itself. For those that perform on a regular basis, will find the Bose L1 Compact System worth the cost.

MEEBLIP - Image From http://meeblip.noisepages.com/

All I can is WOW! A digital synth module that provides the ability to create 80′s analog synth style mono sounds quickly and play them via a MIDI keyboard. This is something that is certainly lacking from many synths on the marketplace the past decade or so.

I grew up listening to 80′s New Wave music and still enjoy much of the music today. The mono synths used in the 80′s had such a unique sound never before heard before the 80′s and many artists used creative mixing and over dubbing to produce some really crazy sounds and music with these monosynths.

With analog synths evolving into digital synths with sampled sounds and true to life sound, it is wonderful to see a synth module that goes back to the early days of artificial noise. The unit coupled with a MIDI keyboard allows you to play weird waveforms and adjust the sound in realtime.

The MEEBLIP seems like a great and inexpensive way to produce some of the old sounds without spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars for sound modules that have sampled mono synth sounds. Create your own mono sounds using the MEEBLIP. This seems like a great way to dust off your old MIDI keyboard and bring some life back to your music creativity.

The unit is available as an OPEN SOURCE design thus allowing anyone with some electronic skills to modify and expand the unit to their hearts content. The unit is apparently available now for $129.00 USD and in kit form for $79.00 USD.

You can go to http://meeblip.noisepages.com/ to read more on the MEEBLIP and hear some of the weird and wonderous mono sounds produced from the MEEBLIP.

Sony Mp3 Player

The 16GB S Series Walkman® Video MP3 Player from Sony is more than just a music player. It sports a 2.0 inch TFT color display that also plays videos ( QVGA 240 X 320).  Comes with a built-in FM radio and a pair of noise cancelling headphones.

The battery life is estimated at approximately 40 hours of music listening and 10 hours of video viewing. More than sufficient for most frequent travellers.

In the Box:

• MP3 Player
• USB Adapter Cable
• In-flight Adapter Cable

NOTE: I would have prefered to see also in the box an AC adapter which connects to the USB cable for standard charging instead of relying solely on a USB port of a computer.

Cowonx7 MP3 Player

Cowon X7 MP3 player

This unit is much more than a MP3 player with a large screen. The Cowon X7 is a complete multimedia player with a 4.3 inch 16 million color TFT touch screen. Comes with 2 GB of flash operating memory and at least 120 Gb of hard drive storage space.

File format supported:

Audio – MP2/3, WMA, OGG, FLC, APE, WAV

Video – AVI, WMV, ASF with DIVX

Built-in FM Radio

Built-in Speakers for private listenig without headphones.

Built-in Bluetooth for wireless control and listening. (A2DP – AVRCP *)

A/V Out to a TV to share your movies on a larger screen.

The Cowon X7 also comes with a built-in Flash player which gives you access to literally thousands of Flash based games and videos downloadable for free. The user interface also supports a few applets like a calculator, stopwatch and a notepad for drawings and memos.  The large HDD can also double as a mass storage unit allowing you easy access to the storage space via the USB connector. The Cowon X7 certainly is a versatile portable unit comes a multimedia device and a mass torage unit al in one. Go to Cowon Global for more details.

*A2Dp: Advanced Audio Distribution Profile

*AVRCP: Audio/Video Remote Control Profile

I still haven’t worked out the logistics yet, but somehow a bunch of big, burly men in a sturdy wooden boat managed to lose an entire night’s plunder.  Guess there was a hole in the bag?  Anyway, now that the crew is theoretically sober, it’s up to you to help guide them through 48 levels across 6 different worlds to recover all their gold.  It won’t be easy, as your path will be littered with whirlpools, rapids, and many things that make your ship go “ouch”.  There are a few things that you can safely run into or over, but most things will be happy to take one or more lives away from you, depending on how well you’ve gotten yourself trapped.  You start with five lives, and when they are gone you have to start the level over.

Follow The Seagulls

If the lives don’t get you, the timer will.  Each level is timed.  In some you get the time all at once, and in others you get a little time to start and must reach checkpoints to get more time.  On many occasions I have literally run out of time right before the finish line.  But wait, there’s more.  You must also collect a certain number of coins to earn a bronze shield.  If you don’t get at least a bronze you can’t pass the level.  You can of course earn sliver and gold shields as well, but I’m happy to get a bronze on most levels.

There really aren’t a whole lot of bonuses to be found in the game.  Once in a while you’ll come across a stash that gives you a significant bump in your gold meter.  You might also find extra timers even on levels that don’t have checkpoints.  The one bonus that is pretty cool is the Berserker token, which for a short time allows you to break through anything without getting hurt.  If you see this on a level, you should pretty much assume that you’re going to need it.

Dangers Ahead

Now comes the part that I don’t get along with – the controls.  To move the boat forward or backward you swipe two fingers (down for forward and up for backward).  If you want to turn left, swipe down on the left side of the boat.  To turn right, use the right side of the boat.  To make a sharp turn you must swipe two fingers in a somewhat circular fashion in the direction you want to turn.  This is the main issue, because once you get going the “fast turn” is often hard to execute, only to finally be pulled off once you actually want to go straight again.  I have lost so many lives trying to execute the fast turns, and I’m almost 20 levels into the game.  Innovative controls?  To an extent, yes.  Practical for the craziness that ensues in some of these levels?  Not really.

The graphics in Vikings Row are pretty nice.  The top down perspective suits the game well, especially since you see very little of the Vikings themselves during the game.  There are nice little details like silhouettes of fish swimming in the water or birds or bats flying overhead.  I love the levels where you are in the whale and there is garbage floating past you.  Very authentic (at least what I’ve been told from every Saturday morning cartoon).

Mermaid Surprise

The sound effects are also pretty decent.  Nothing overly memorable, but nothing overwhelming either.  I’m a bit disappointed that there aren’t any comments from the Vikings as you’re sailing along.  There’s a lot of room for humor there, I’d think.  The music is nice, and fits the mood of the game fairly well.  It’s a tad ominous, but nothing overly brooding.

This game has so much potential, and I really want to say that I enjoy it.  I just can’t get over my frustrations with the controls.  You can replay any level to try and get a better shield, but the reality is that I’m so relieved when I finally pass a level that there’s no way I’d go back and play it again.  The concept, the graphics and the sound are all there, but the game almost becomes stressful when you’re trying to turn the ship and it’s just not cooperating, and a stressful game is not a fun game.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

mScribble is an app for making music.  Unlike traditional apps that might emulate an instrument such as a drum or guitar, however, mScribble only requires one finger and the desire for you to draw on the screen.  You pick one of nine background melodies ranging from jazz to “Big Feet”, then you pick a “sound color” (your choices are blue, green, red and orange) and finally you tap start.  Then you just drag your finger across the screen and you’re writing a song!  When you’re done you can double-tap the arrow in the lower left corner of the screen to access a menu which will allow you to email the song you’ve just created to yourself or a friend.  Unfortunately this feature doesn’t seem to work on my iPod Touch 2G, otherwise I’d share a “composition” with you.

Scribble For A Song

The left side of the screen is quiet and the right is loud, so you adjust the volume by moving back and forth.  This is just for your notes, not for the background melody.  Higher notes are at the top of the screen and lower notes at the bottom, so you can change the notes you’re playing by moving up and down.  If you just tap and hold on an area the note you’re playing will change as the melody changes.  Finally, you can adjust the vibrato by gently shaking the device, though that’s kind of hard to do while you’re playing music at the same time.

One thing I really like about mScribble is that unless you need to look at the pretty lights when you’re drawing you can effectively use this without staring at the screen.  It’s great if you’re embarrassed about messing with your device in front of people that don’t know what you’re doing.  As long as you use subtle movements to make the music, no one will even know you’re playing a game (unless you’re not wearing headphones, of course).

The main thing that’s missing from mScribble is a way to save and replay your creations on-device.  The email feature is nice (when it works), but it’s kind of shame that your only chance to do anything with a given song is when you first exit from playing that song.  A nice little file system at least showing the date the song was created, the length of the song and the background music that was used would be cool.  And of course the ability to email from archive and delete from archive should be there.  Still, for what the program offers it’s a lot of fun to mess around with.

As one might expect, the graphics are pretty basic.  Notes fly across the screen in a steady stream, and a line that’s constantly changing color follows your finger around.  There are, of course, no sound effects, as that would detract from the music.  There are 9 base tracks that you can choose from, and while none of them are really bad, you’re sure to find a couple favorites.  The nice part is that no matter which one you choose, it’s pretty hard to add a bad note on top of it with whatever algorithm they use to generate the music you “create”.

Those of you looking for high scores and leader boards need to look elsewhere.  Or maybe you need this as your bit of relaxation amidst all the stress of competition.  This is a great application to just pull out and mess with for a few minutes while you’re waiting in line somewhere or perhaps when that elevator is taking a bit too long to reach your floor.  And if you’ve got kids that love music, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have this application.  I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that we might see a few more background tracks some day.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[Note: since I wrote this review I've been in touch with the developer via Appular, and it turns out my problem with sending my songs out as emails is a combination of older device (iPod Touch 2G), older OS (3.1.3) and overall song size.  If all goes well the issue should be fixed in iOS 4.2, so if you've got an iPod Touch 2G and you're on the upgrade path you should be fine.  In the mean time, you can still send really short songs!]

[All About Quick Looks]

In Drop Dead you play a guy running from zombies.  To escape the zombies you must feed them body parts, which is done by matching three or more of the same parts in a row.  You can either tap each of two adjacent parts to swap them, or you can drag the two parts to make the exchange.  From there you probably know how the whole match 3 thing works by now.  If you make a match of 4 parts you get an explosive version of that part which will blow up all parts adjacent to it when used in a match.  If you are lucky enough to match 5 parts you get a grenade that will destroy all instances of a part that it is swapped with.

Run Away!

Drop Dead has 3 different game play modes.  In Story mode you’ll race through 20 levels, each of which requires you to feed the zombie enough parts that it falls off the edge of the screen.  Once you’ve beaten a level in Story mode it becomes available in the other two modes.  In Endless mode you pick one level and your goal is to keep the zombie at bay for as long as you can.  The only quibble I have with this mode is that if you pick a lower level, the game should still speed up after a while.  Otherwise good players could find the lower levels truly endless.  In Impending Doom you will get caught, it’s just a matter of how many matches you can make before the zombie gets to you.

The big thing missing from this game is any sort of social integration.  I’d personally love to see OpenFeint since I’m still running OS 3.1.3, but Game Center would be better than nothing.  It’s kind of odd to see a game these days with a focus on scoring that doesn’t give you the opportunity to rub those scores in other players’ faces.  Obviously it’s not mandatory, but it sure would help this game a lot.

The graphics are really cool in a cartoony sort of way.  It’s funny because I often forget that the matching objects are body parts.  For instance, the spine part often reminds me of the neck of a guitar.  The real treat is the little window at the bottom of the screen that shows you running from the zombies.  There are a number of different zombie designs to entertain you, and the backgrounds are pretty cool as well.  It would be cool to see even more different zombie types based on the commentary of some of the levels, but what’s there is a great start.

The sound effects aren’t bad.  The one thing that’s really missing is any moaning and groaning from the zombies.  A zombie game always has to have moaning and groaning.  The music is decent, though it would be nice to have a few different themes to spread across the levels, given how diverse the settings are.  The music played at the main menu is actually more interesting than the in-game music, which sadly seems to happen a lot with indie games.  Not quite sure what makes the menu so appealing to give it the cool music.

Drop Dead is a nice little match 3 game with a cool zombie theme.  There may be nothing revolutionary about the mechanics, and it might even seem like a step back in some regards, but I still found myself clicking next each time I beat a level to move on.  There are definitely some improvements that could be made, but given the cheap price tag you shouldn’t feel gypped for what you get.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

2 Pair

Dice Tower is a game about building towers.  As you might have guessed, these towers will be built from dice.  The key here is that the number on the dice makes all the difference in the world.  For the first layer you can use any dice you want except wild card dice.  For any layer after that, the die placed at a given location must either be the sum or the difference of the two dice below it.

There are two exceptions to this rule.  The first is if the two dice below the position are the same, in which case the die can have the same number as those two dice.  The second is if there is only one die below the position.  Then the die you are placing must have the same value, twice the value or half the value of the die below it.  It’s a bit odd to describe on paper, but it works quite well in practice.  Also, don’t worry if your math skills aren’t the best.  As long as you can add and subtract between the numbers 1 through 6 you’ll do just fine.

To help you along the way you might roll a wild card die, which can be used for any number.  In addition you might get an extra roll, more time (on the timed mode), or a treasure that gives you a random value of up to 1000 points.  On the flip side, you could get a die for less time, one that randomly removes dice from the top layer, and one that destroys everything in your hand.  If you get the bomb and lose the contents of your hand, that could be game over if that was your last roll.

Everything is executed via drag ‘n drop.  The control is quite responsive, but sometimes it’s hard to tell where you’re placing a die.  This is especially true if you’re trying to store one in the chest, which is an area that lets you keep a couple dice from your hand as spares before you re-roll.  Rolling is a simple matter of tapping the cup in the bottom right corner of the screen.  Everything else is handled automatically, and power ups (or downs) are used as soon as you get them, with the exception of the wild card die and the free roll.

Almost There

There are three game play modes in Dice Tower: Casual, Time Attack and Endless.  In Casual and Time Attack you must build each tower to a certain number of floors starting with 6 rolls per tower.  The main difference between the two modes is that on Time Attack each tower is timed.  In Endless mode you start with 10 rolls and keep on building until you run out of rolls and dice to place.  Endless mode requires the most strategy early on, because if you’re not careful about placing your dice you might use up your rolls a lot sooner than you’d like.  I’m not normally a fan of endless scenarios, but I like the heightened strategic element in this one.

The game isn’t overly flashy, but it looks really nice.  The playing field has a clean layout, everything is easy to read and it’s perfectly clear what’s what.  I like how a little platform slides out for you to roll the dice on.  It’s also pretty sharp when a special die zooms in off the rolling area and then the symbol stays for a second while the actual die fades away.  The little effects like that which are scattered throughout the game give it a nice touch.

The sound effects are decent enough.  A die roll sounds like a die roll and so forth.  The audio is actually a bit more subdued than the graphics even.  The music is nice except for the fact that every song sounds like it’s just a few bars constantly being repeated.  As a result it kind of gets monotonous after a while.

If you’re looking for the splash of games like Digital Chocolate’s Bloxx series, you won’t find it here.  Instead what you get is a stylish yet humble presentation over a unique take on the tower building genre.  If you need some twitch reflex action, you probably want to look elsewhere.  If you’d like to exercise your brain a bit (while still relying on the occasional bit of luck) then Dice Tower is a good choice for you.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

What's In The Trunk?

You start out receiving a package from your grandfather telling you to come find him at his manor.  Once you arrive you must solve one puzzle after another to find your grandfather and the secret his is trying so desperately to hide.  There really aren’t any instructions to the game, but anyone that’s played a point and click adventure game in the past 20 years will feel right at home before long.

There are several rooms within the house to explore, and you’ll even journey out to the shed and an old tree stump in the back yard.  Given that the house was just a decently sized structure and not a sprawling mansion, the developer did a good job of making sure there were enough puzzles to keep you busy.  On the plus side some of the puzzles did make you think, but there really wasn’t a time where my brain-wheels were spinning like crazy trying to solve something.

You Got The Time?

As a result, the overall game is not very long, especially if you’re a seasoned puzzle solver / adventure gamer.  As luck would have it, however, the game length is considerably extended due to the fact that you have to traipse back and forth between some rooms several times before solving a puzzle.  Well, there’s that and the fact that it feels like you’re constantly waiting for scenes to load.  Despite these issues, I was drawn in from the beginning and didn’t want to put the game down until I had completed it.  The only other drawback was that the ending, while somewhat interesting, was kind of a letdown given all you had to do to get there.

This is a straightforward adventure game with no mini-games to be found.  That basically means everything is a “tap to operate” type affair, so you won’t have any issues controlling the game.  There also aren’t any twinkles or real hints as to what you can interact with, which means in a couple of cases you end up “hunting and pecking” your way through a scene, though once again it’s not as bad as it sounds.  There is no concept of a hint system in the game, though it doesn’t really seem to need it.

A Tree Stump... With A Hole

The graphics in Grisly Manor are wonderful.  Everything is nicely detailed, and while there’s not a whole lot going on in this manor outside of you, there is some animation when appropriate.  I would have liked to have seen a bit more of an intro / ending, maybe done up in a comic panel style format, but what’s there is very nice visually.  The sound effects enhance what they’re sounding off about, but nothing really stands out.  Hearing the grandfather’s voice at the beginning and end would have been nice.  The music is actually really good, and definitely gets you in the mood for exploring the manor.

This game was a surprise, but ended up being one of the good kind of surprises.  Despite its short length and load times, it’s an enjoyable old school adventure with plenty of puzzles and enough mystery to keep you hooked until the end.  If you’re an adventure game fan, this is one you don’t want to miss.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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With digital music having taken over the marketplace, the old cassette tapes are no longer something worth keeping. Some of you may still have some old cassette tapes with rare songs that are either not available in digital format or hard to find. Now you can preserve these old cassette tapes and transform them into digital format very easily. Ion Audio has created the Tape Express Plus which allows you to quickly transfer your cassette tapes to digital audio format (mp3).

This product looks just like your old portable cassette tape player and has a digital output to a USB connection port. The unit runs on batteries or can be directly powered from the USB port of your PC or MAC.

Just the product you need to keep all your classic cassette tapes alive and at a retail price of $59.99 you cannot go wrong. The player also supports headphones just like a standard cassette tape player for added convenience to go old school.

Check out the Tape Express Plus and other cool digital products at  ionaudio.com.

The game is actually a collection of 5 Tappi Bear games that are all available separately on the iPhone: Space Rush, Donut Dance, Donut Ninja, KungFu Battle and Tap Tap Jump.  I would expect that as more Tappi Bear games get created this collection will get updated as well, so if you think even one or two of them sound worthwhile you might as well save yourself a bit of home page space and get the collection.  Honestly, I actually find several of them mildly amusing, and I’m a far cry from a kid.

Space Rush

Space Rush is a simple “dodge the asteroids” style game.  You move back and forth either by swiping or tapping the left and right sides of the screen.  Personally I find the swipe method more precise.  The playing field is broken up into three lanes, and you need to make sure Tappi Bear is always in the empty lane (unless of course there’s a donut in the lane, then you want that one).  The problem with using the tap method is that a tap will often move you more than one lane, resulting in some bad stuff happening.

Donut Dance

Donut Dance is a memory game where a group of bears will dance around, passing a donut between them.  When the music stops you have to pick the bear that’s holding the donut.  It sounds easy, but as the group gets bigger and the donut goes faster it gets hard to follow along.  This is my least favorite one, mainly because I’m no good at following quick moving objects, especially when there are cute dancing bears to watch!

Donut Ninja

Donut Ninja is cool just because the concept of a bear ninja tossing donuts is so funny.  You don’t control Tappi, but rather you just tap the bad guys to throw donuts at them.  The bad guys are descending towards you, and if one of them passes your defenses and gets to you it’s game over.  The real catch here is that some bears have numbers on them, and you must hit those bears the number of times on their shirt plus 1.  This game actually is somewhat addicting, and it can actually get crazy when multiple bears with numbers are coming at you.

KungFu Battle

KungFu Battle has you guarding a pile (and by pile I mean 3) of donuts from evil bears.  You simply tap left to attack to the left and right to attack to the right.  The thing with KungFu Battle is that you must have both timing and patience.  If you miss you are stunned for a second, and that’s all it takes for a bear to steal a donut.  Apparently I don’t have timing or patience, so I’m not very good at this one, though I do better than at Donut Dance.  Thankfully the music on this one is decent so I don’t mind trying a few times to get it right.

Tap Tap Jump

Finally there’s Tap Tap Jump, which kind of reminds me of NinJump just with cute bears, cute birds and donuts.  You basically jump back and forth between two vines, trying to get as high as you can.  The longer you press your finger before releasing the more powerful your jump, but if you wait too long the game will be over.  The game also ends if you hit a bear or bird.

The nice thing about these games is that you can pretty much play them with one finger, though games where you move left and right are a bit easier to use one finger for left and another for right.  They’re also easy to understand yet still entertaining, so they should work quite well for the younger set.  You might also get the slightly older ones interested, though they may not admit it.  You’d probably be pushing it for teens, though!

The graphics are nice, and will definitely hold a young child’s interest.  Everything is bright and colorful, and even though you can tell the bad guys from Tappi Bear they aren’t intimidating in any way.  The images are detailed yet not overly so, kind of like a nicely drawn PBS cartoon.  The animation isn’t bad either.  Sometimes it feels a bit stiff, but that might actually be on purpose.  Whatever the case the visuals are pleasing.  The sound effects are decent, and certainly suit the game, but there’s nothing overly exciting going on there.  I do quite like the music, though certainly some of the songs are better than others.  Ironically enough, my least favorite song is the one from Donut Dance.  Go figure.

Overall Tappi Bear All In 1 is a nice collection of games for kids.  It’s also a decent collection of games for the parents to secretly load up for a few minutes after the kids have gone to bed.  Now don’t get me wrong – if you don’t have kids then even if you find the games amusing you’re probably not going to be playing it for long, though for 99 cents that may not bother you.  However, for those of you with kids this is definitely a game to consider purchasing.  There’s plenty of variety in the five included mini-games, and hopefully with enough purchases they’ll be encouraged to keep expanding the collection.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Down We Go

The three game play modes you start out with are story, hard story and rescue.  I can’t really comment on the others because I haven’t unlocked them nor do I know how to.  At any rate, in Rescue mode your task is to navigate your hero towards the sides of the screen, tapping all the helpless creatures that need to be rescued.  In the mean time you need to avoid all the spiked objects that litter the screen, some of which are stationary while others are moving towards you.  There might be more to this mode, but I can’t seem to get very far as there are an insane amount of spiked objects at any given time, and the overly sensitive controls ensure that I almost always move more to the left or right than I really want to at any given time.  Needless to say I’m not a very big fan of this mode, though if the difficulty were tuned down a bit it might be kind of fun.

Then there’s story mode.  This is where the game gets interesting, though it’s in no way less frustrating.  You start off with a sword and some money, and you must make your way down a pit to slay an evil beast.  Your character is constantly in motion, and the only control you have is to move him left and right.  Along the way there will be monsters to fight, which you can kill just by running into them.  Every monster leaves a coin, and you actually have to touch the coin to get it.  No auto pick ups here.  At the very beginning of the game and then once every so many meters you’ll encounter a store.  The store will allow you to buy and sell armor, weapons and more.  If you want to buy a better version of something you have you have to sell the old item first, as there is only one slot for each thing.  It would be nice if the game handled this automatically for you, but it’s not a big deal.

The other thing you can do at the store is save your game.  The problem is that it cost money, and for every subsequent store you find the price to save goes up, regardless of whether you took advantage of the save in a previous store or not.  The problem with this is that so far I can barely earn enough money to either save or upgrade equipment, and without upgrading equipment you won’t make it very far in the game.  It almost feels like a not so subtle way for the developers to discourage saving, especially since the save game is one of the features lacking in the Hard story mode.  If there are people that really like this kind of save system then I say it’s okay as an option, but there really needs to be a baby mode for people who like to save whenever they want.  Being able to save my game should not be a punishment, and that’s exactly what it becomes when I have to sacrifice my equipment money in order to save.

A Slot Machine Must've Exploded!

I’m also not so keen on is the controls, and the sad part is I think they are the way they are by design.  Regardless of whether you use the touch or tilt method of control, your character moves really fast until you purchase a pair of boots, which then help you control him better.  I’m all for this conceptually, but again the level of control is not consummate with the spacing and diminishing sizes of the platforms, which means you spend and awful lot of time dying simply because of bad control.  Very rarely do I lose a game because I actually run out of hit points.  Again, I could live with this if the save system were better, but the combination of the two means that I almost never make it past 100 meters in the game (and I know by the achievements that the pit is at least 700 meters deep).  If nothing else the game needs a baby mode for those of us with little time and even less skill.

The graphics are actually pretty cool.  The main character looks sort of like a mini-me version of Marge Simpson, but at least the visuals actually change as you equip him with different items.  The critters are kind of cute, and more often then not don’t actually look like your garden variety dungeon crawling baddies.  The sound effects are okay, though nothing very exciting.  The one moment I do like is when you die and your character screams while falling down the pit, only to splash in the water at the bottom.  That effect cracks me up for some reason.  The music is a bit odd.  There are occasions where it sounds really good, but most of the time it sounds like it is only two or three notes stuck in a loop.  I’m not sure if that’s on purpose or if there is a problem with the playback, but either way it tends to get annoying quickly.

The base concepts of Dungeon Core are quite solid, and the game can be a lot of fun to play.  The atmosphere is cool and the ability to buy goods to further your quest is a great addition to the genre.  I just wish they’d come up with a better way to handle the save system and the issue with needing the boots to have any sort of reasonable control over your character.  Maybe fixing one will downplay the other enough to cancel them out, but having them both in the game makes it a lot more frustrating than it needs to be.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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You play the hero Vincent, who has been brought back from the dead to help restore some order by destroying an out of control vampire population.  Of course, you think you’re just trying to avenge the death of your loved one, but that’s taken care of in the first part of the game.  Anyway, the background is revealed to you through a combination of pages from a book on vampire lore and comic book style cut scenes between you and the various main nasties in the game.  In between all this exposition is a whole lot of creature killing, some key finding, and just a bit of puzzle solving, though not really enough to call it even a hybrid adventure game in my opinion.  I would have liked to have seen a bit more adventuring, but I guess I can get that fix by playing the Path Of The Dragon series.

The Undead Are Dead Again

There are three main ways to interact with critters in the game.  The first is with your guns, which basically becomes a glorified shooting gallery.  You can either tap directly on the creature to shoot it, or you can aim towards the creature with the virtual joystick and then use the fire button to shoot.  I prefer the direct tap method, because the auto targeting seems a bit flaky.  You basically get three ranged weapons, so don’t expect a whole array of cool toys like in iDracula.  The second method of interaction is sword “fighting”.  I use this term loosely, because basically you’re watching a movie, and every once in a while you trace a line of blood to cause Vincent to attack correctly.  Honestly this is a really weak mechanic, as it makes the boss battles way too easy.  The third thing you’ll do is run.  There are several sequences where you have to outrun something, which is a big pain regardless of whether you use the virtual joystick or the “tap to move” method of control.  Overall the interaction with the bad guys could have used a bit of tweaking.

The main story mode is divided into 3 “chapters”, with a boss at the end of each chapter.  There is also a survival mode, but I didn’t find that particularly interesting, so I’ll leave that up to you to check out in the lite version of Vampire Origins if you so desire.  Both story and survival modes have easy and nightmare difficulty settings, and I’d say it took me roughly 3-4 hours to complete the story mode on easy.  Someone with any amount of action game savvy could probably complete the game in a couple of hours.  The biggest obstacle to any of this is the controls, but if you master that the game is not all that difficult.  There are achievements to be earned through Crystal if you’re a subscriber to that social network.  I’m not sure how many there are, because Crystal isn’t cooperating with me at the moment, but the main page says I’ve only completed 3% of them, so there must be quite a few.

Your Conversations Are Grim

The graphics are pretty nice, though the fact that they are pre-rendered makes some of the backdrops feel a bit “fake”.  The color palette also leaves a bit to be desired.  I’m sure they were going for dreary because of the somber mood of the game, but dreary often turns into muddled instead.  The characters themselves are nicely rendered, and there actually aren’t too many issues with clipping and such things that are usually present in 3D games on handheld devices.  Sometimes everything gets just a bit sluggish, but I would probably attribute that to the fact that I’m still running a second generation iPod Touch.

The sound effects are decent enough, though the noise the little axe wielding freak makes is kind of annoying.  It would have been cool to have some voices to go along with the main characters during the cut scenes, but it doesn’t really hamper anything with them not being there.  Given the survival horror nature of the game it seems like there should be creepy background music playing throughout your journey.  There is some good music that plays, but sadly it’s only during the menu and fight scenes.  I really think it would have helped the ambience to have something playing throughout the game.

Normally I try not to read other people’s “reviews” of a game that I’m working on reviewing myself, but in this case I ended up reading several comments in a thread while looking for the answer to a question I had.  There seemed to be a lot of negative vibes towards this game.  It certainly wasn’t the best, especially when weighed against the likes of Resident Evil and other such survival horror games.  On the other hand, it wasn’t nearly as bad as many were making it out to be.  The controls could use a bit of tweaking and some more adventure type stuff would be nice, but what’s there is an interesting start.  I will say that I had enough fun with this that I wouldn’t mind seeing the next part to the saga, assuming the developers are still planning on releasing it at some point.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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The premise behind the game is simple.  You control a ball that collects jewels, and your job is to collect all the jewels of a certain color on a given level while avoiding all the jewels of the other color.  As you collect jewels your ball grows bigger, and as your ball gets bigger you’re able to collect bigger jewels.  If a jewel of the wrong color suddenly becomes small enough for you to collect it will change colors so you can grab it.  The goal is to collect enough jewels to grow your ball by 10 levels.  Once you’ve done that you’ll get 5 seconds to collect as many jewels as you can for extra points (they’ll all be the right color at this point), and then you move on to the next level.

Hole In The Middle

Unfortunately there are only 15 levels, because I think I’ll be sad once I’ve beaten them all.  Of course, the developer has made sure that task isn’t so easy once you get into the hard set.  The problem is that the difficulty doesn’t really come from the levels themselves, but rather the control.  All you have to do is tilt the device to move the ball.  There’s no option to calibrate, however, and sometimes it seems like it takes an awful lot of effort to get the ball to switch directions.  There’s a speed option, but make it too fast and the motion of the ball is jerky, and making it too slow pretty well guarantees you won’t be making many necessary quick turns.  And to top it off screen rotation isn’t an option.  Screen rotation happens automatically and usually at the worst time.  The controls really need to be tweaked a bit.

The levels really don’t get interesting until half way through the game, and even then the most complicated seems to be four squares connected by walkways with skimpy borders around the edges to encourage you to fall and an occasional hole in the middle of a square.  Variety is key here.  It would also be nice if the game did something different like maybe switch up the “good’ color every now and again within the same level.  That would certainly throw the player for a loop.  Despite all these critiques I definitely think there’s something going on here.  I’d just like to see the developer take the game from being fun and strangely addictive yet average to something that can really stand out from the crowd.

Surrounded

While not at the level of games like Hydro Tilt or Aerox, the graphics in Jewels Maker are decent.  The colors and patterns can be a bit garish, but nothing is overwhelming.  The ball looks like a big marble, which is actually kind of cool, and the jewels look decent.  The sparkle when you hit a jewel is a nice little touch.  The sound effects are workable as well.  Where the aesthetics stick out, however, is in the music department.  There are three tunes: one for the menu, one for the main game play, and one for the bonus time.  I don’t know if they were composed specifically for this game or if they were chosen from a site of the internet or what, but however you look at it the music is great and in an odd way really suits the game.

I’ve played better ball rolling games, but I’ve certainly played much worse.  The truth is that amidst the game’s brevity and issues it has a certain charm that can’t be denied.  I really hope the developer continues to enhance Jewels Maker, though, because I do believe that given the right amount of love and care it could become one of the top tier ball rolling games.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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You take on the role of Barry Steakfries, and your mission is simple.  Run as far as you can and take out as many monsters as possible before your demise.  You will not win, but you can have a whole lot of fun in the process of dying.  You’ll travel between four realms, fighting vampires, mummies, zombies and demons every step of the way.  You’ll also have the opportunity to collect a few weapons including “the Pacifier”, which shoots a bullet all the way across the screen, and the machine gun jet pack, which literally propels you in the air as you rain bullets on the bad guys below.

Let's Do The Dash, Let's Do The Monster Dash...

You’re constantly running, so all you have to worry about is jumping by pressing on the lower left corner of the screen and shooting by pressing on the lower right corner of the screen.  Initially you’re shown buttons for these two actions, but I think you can hit anywhere within the general location of each button to perform the action.  You’ll automatically pick up weapons when you run into them.  Your main gun is limitless but doesn’t have a very good range, and all the rest of the weapons have a small amount of ammo.  I would encourage you not to horde, however.  It’s much easier to get rid of the monsters whenever possible so you have more room to jump around.

There are two ways to die – fall down a pit or lose all your hearts.  You lose a heart if you get hit by a monster or run into the various traps protruding from the ground on occasion throughout each level.  Every level has a heart on it to replenish one hit, and if you’re health is full when you hit that heart you’ll actually get an additional heart added to your health meter.  Your score is based solely on how far you run, and each 1000 meters you’ll be teleported to a new world.  The game uses OpenFeint for leader boards and achievements (there are 25 altogether), and you can also post scores to Facebook and Twitter.  The one thing I’d like to see if they do some updates is a couple of new worlds.  I love the ones that already exist, but more variety is always good.

Mr. Zappy Is Electrifying

The graphics are great.  The overall style reminds me of an updated version of an old Apogee shareware game.  The characters look cool and each has their own death animation.  My favorite is the vampire, which looks like it bursts into a bunch of bats upon death.  Even your own character crumbles into a pile of bones when he dies.  The special effects are pretty slick as well.  When you get hit the borders of the screen go red (I know it’s an old trick, but it still looks cool).  When you use Mr. Zappy everything goes dark and you can temporarily see your skeleton.  The backgrounds are very nicely drawn too, and each had nice little touches to represent the creature of the land, like pyramids on the mummy level.

The sound effects are a perfect compliment to the visuals.  Every weapon has a unique sound, and there are enough little ambient noises that the world doesn’t feel dead (though for all intents and purposes it is!)  The only thing missing are some amusing quips from the hero.  I could easily see Barry being the next Duke Nukem with some creative catch phrase.  The music is quite catchy and really helps get the adrenaline pumping.

There’s no question in my mind that Monster Dash is the premiere run and jump game on the App Store right now.  The visuals have a “modern 80s shareware” look to them, the audio is very well done, and the game itself is just plain fun.  I just wonder what the next run and jump developer is going to have to do to kick the genre up a notch again.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Grow A Truffula Tree

The Truffula tree forests have been decimated, and it’s up to you to help the Lorax regrow them to their former glory.  To accomplish this you must raise trees and plants using the intuitive interface designed for Flower Garden.  At the bottom of the screen you have a pot, and at the top of the screen is a water meter controlled by a watering pot.  When working on a tree you’ll fill the meter to the right edge of the green, and then let the tree grow and use up some of that precious liquid.

Growing plants is a bit more complicated.  Each plant growing session is timed, so you will only get so many plants per session.  The watering meter has an “overwatered” level on the right that you don’t want to reach (it’s yellow in color).  Weeds will also sprout up which you must pull by dragging them out of the pot.  Weeding is actually kind of fun (within the context of Lorax Garden only), and feels kind of like a mini-game.  Any plant grown successfully during a session will earn you a heart that can be used to help grow trees more quickly.

Once a plant growing session is over or a tree is fully bloomed, the foliage will be removed from the greenhouse and relocated to the garden you’re working on.  Each garden has its own set of requirements in order to be completed, and you can opt to completely regrow a garden at any time.  As the game progresses you’ll earn more types of seeds for plants, as well as unlocking characteristics of the trees that will let you customize them to your will.  The one thing I would like to see is the ability to position the plants and trees in the garden yourself, sort of like how Bloomies works.

Show Off Your Gardens

Lorax Garden looks pretty sweet.  At any time you can go back and view any of the gardens you’ve completed, which really look like they came straight from a Dr. Seuss book.  When you’re actually in the greenhouse it is fun to watch the plants and trees grow in 3D.  The contraption that lets you specify the characteristics of the tree you’re planting also looks like a vintage Dr. Seuss gadget.  The sound effects are decent enough, with the gentle patter of rain as you water your foliage and background effects that shift from the howling winds of a deserted landscape to the lively chirps of a populated garden.  The only thing missing is some soothing background music.

I’m still not 100% sure I’d classify products like Flower Garden or Lorax Garden as games, but Lorax Garden certainly comes closer in that regards.  Whatever the case might be, it’s fun growing plants and Truffula trees, and it’s always nice to see the fruits of your labor as you gaze upon a loving regrown forest.  And, if you’ve got kids this would be a great game to play with them.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

You control the pig team, and you’re goal is to try and keep those nasty wolves at bay.  The playing field is divided into 4 rows, each row containing 7 squares.  You can place a unit on any square that is open.  If you decide you don’t want a particular unit on a square, erase it and place something else there (you don’t get any money back, however).  Once you fend off a certain number of wolves you’ll move on to the next level.  At the beginning of each level you get to pick which units you wish to take with you on the level.  You get 15 to choose from, but you only have a certain number of slots that you can fill, and you can’t put the same unit in two different slots.  You must choose wisely, but chances are you’ll need to play some levels through a few times before you know which combination works best.

Robin Pork And His Merry Bacon Squad?

I like the variety of units.  The most fundamental unit is the piggy bank.  Without any of these you’ll never be able to build enough troops to fight your battles.  As for troops you have your basic pig with a sling shot, but eventually you’ll get more worthwhile shooters.  In addition to the offensive units you have defensive units like the Eskimo that throws ice at the enemies to slow them down or the photographer that flashes the bad guys to temporarily stun them.  There are even pig-made units like the bomb that will take care of all the units around it when it goes off, and the scare-pig, that acts as a defense the wolves have to get through before they can proceed.  Each unit has an offense and defense rating, so plan accordingly when placing them on the battlefield.

There are also plenty of villains to go around.  You start out with the basic brown wolf that can easily be dispatched with one or two shots as you get better shooters.  Then you have the blue wolf which is somewhat tougher, and the granny wolf that requires you to get through the disguise before you can actually take out the wolf.  Other wolves include a kamikaze wolf and a wolf with a torch that likes to burn down defenses.  This is just the tip of the iceberg, however, as new wolves get introduced for quite a few levels in classic mode (which you might also call campaign mode).  There’s also a survival mode, which I think is just playing for as long as you can with as many units as you’ve unlocked in classic mode.  I personally prefer the finite levels to classic mode, but I’m sure there are others that will enjoy the “how long can you last?” option.

They Call Me MR. Pig!

The graphics have the same cartoon charm as imPig.  The characters are nicely detailed and the animation isn’t too bad.  Everything is bright and colorful, and the cutscenes look like comic book panels.  It would be nice to see more of them, though.  The sound effects are okay, but the game needs more of them, especially when it comes to the wolves and pigs.  It would be nice to hear them react when they are getting hit or when they’ve made a kill.  It doesn’t have to be every time, but the occasional noise would be cool.  The music is good, but the various selections are all wildly different, and I know I’ve heard at least one or two of them in other games.

Overall I’ve quite enjoyed this game.  Again it’s not my favorite style of strategy game, but it certainly makes up for that shortcoming with a variety of units and a great atmosphere.  I’m really starting to get into this “pigs vs. wolves” universe, and I hope we see more games that tell the tales of these warring clans.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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The Dark Forest

I really wish this game had a story, because it’s just the kind of game that needs one.  Not because it would make the game any better, but because given the overall look and feel of the game, a story would be both amazing to look at and funny to read.  Since there’s not one, my best guess is that you’re trying to save a princess, since one of the levels is entitled “save the princess”.  I have some deductive reasoning skillz, that’s for sure.  You do this by employing one of the greatest weapons to ever grace a video game – a giant sling shot and a gnome.  Not even any old gnome, mind you, but Chuck Gnome.  I think his middle initial is D, though it’s never clearly stated.

I know Angry Birds did it first, and there’s even some argument that the birds are more amusing, but there’s something so prolific about hearing the war cry “Chuck Smash” in a high pitched voice that can’t be beat.  Regardless, your sole purpose is to pull Chuck back in the slingshot and let him go, hopefully hitting one of the many targets that litter the screen at any given time.  The first level is practice, so it’s filled with mundane things like clouds and trees.  There’s an additional cloud level to be unlocked when you beat the first one (appropriately called “First Flight”), but that level is just insane.  The other unlocked level right from the start is “When Ogres Attack”, and while this is much simpler than “Cloud Buster”, I still can’t figure out how to beat it.  But at least you get cool things like ogres, flaming balls and birds that look suspiciously like one of the characters from the aforementioned “other” game.

The ultimate goal of each level is to defeat enough of something so that you can expose the key, which you also have to acquire by chucking Chuck at it.  The problem is that I can’t for the life of me figure out what the trigger is to finding the key in each level.  I’m pretty sure it has something to do with full moons and the position of your hand over the iPhone antenna, but I can’t prove it.  I’m actually quite shocked that I beat First Flight, and even more so that I actually managed to expose the key two different times (I missed it the first time).  I still haven’t deduced the “last straw” for finding the key on “When Ogres Attack”.

Which brings me to another point – you might be tempted to look at the fact that there are only six levels and say “that’s not much”.  It may not seem like much, but unless you’re an expert Chuck chucker you’ll get your money’s worth simply by playing those levels again and again until you find the key each time.  Plus, rumor has it that the developer is already readying the next two levels for an update to follow soon after the game’s initial release.  I’d be a lot more excited if I thought I’d ever actually see those levels in my lifetime.

Controlling Chuck is a simple matter of dragging him and letting go when he’s in the proper position.  Thankfully you have Chuck Vision, which is a nifty line that shows you the arc he’ll take when flying through the air.  Do keep in mind, however, that the obstacles will be moving all the time as well.  You also have to remember to grab Chuck towards his head, because if you grab too low not only will he get uncomfortable, but you won’t be able to make a very big launch arc.

Storming The Castle...

The graphics in Chuck’s world are fabulous.  The design is such that you feel like you’re watching a puppet show, but of course you’re the main character.  Nothing is overly detailed, but it’s still clear that a lot of work went into making everything look distinct and consistent.  The colors are both vibrant and brooding when they need to be, and it’s fun watching Chuck smash against a mountain or twist an object when he lands on it and his weight spins it around.  I also love how the backgrounds change around as you progress through each level.

The sound effects are decent, though truly the weakest part of the game.  Everything you hit makes a cha-ching, which sounds fine for a target, but not so great for a nasty ogre.  The thump when Chuck hits a hill or something should have been a bit more pronounced as well.  On the other hand, the Chuck-isms are great.  There aren’t many, but they make me smile every time, I’m sure partially due to the helium-inspired sound of Chuck’s voice.  The music is very well written and has an epic quality to it, which almost doesn’t fit the overall mood of the game… or maybe it does.  Either way it’s wonderful to listen to.

* Breaking News * – I finally managed to complete the “When Ogres Attack” level.  I’m not telling, though, so you can suffer just like I did!  Anyway, if you haven’t gathered by now, I’m rather enjoying this game.  I think you will to if you give it a chance.  If you’re really dead set against it, maybe they’ll at least come out with a soundboard app so you can play “Chuck Smash” to your heart’s content.  I know I would.

Final Verdict: Highly Recommended
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Basically, powerbocking is the act of jumping around on spring loaded stilts.  In Jump-O-Mania you jump around various cities, using the items lying around the street as your obstacle course.  You’ll hurdle things like toll both gates, dryers and stretch limos, and that’s just in Russia!  You’re constantly moving, but you can tilt the device left and right to determine how long of a jump you’ll make.  When the time comes you press the jump button to leap in the air.  If you perform multiple jumps in a row you’ll get bonuses.  You also have the option to perform stunts while you’re flying through the air.  This will grant you even bigger bonuses, and the longer you hold the stunt button the more points you’ll get for that stunt.  Don’t get cocky, however, because timing is key, and falling flat on your face not only looks painful, but it ends the round.

You Go, Girl!

This is one of those games where you have to really work to get access to everything.  When you start the game you have one character, one outfit, and one level.  You even only have access to one mode of game play.  As you conquer levels you start to open things up.  Sadly I’ve only beaten the first level, so I haven’t been able to experience things like the second character or other game play mode.  The initial mode is Time Trial, where you must survive for 180 seconds to beat the level.  Scoring is always nice, but I’m not sure it’s a critical element here.  I think as long as you last the 180 seconds you’ll beat the level.  The thing is, that’s not a whole lot of fun, so you’ll find yourself being pulled into multiple jumps and edge of your seat stunts in no time.  And then you’ll watch yourself crumble over a gate or ice cream freezer because your timing was off by just a hair.

The second mode is Survival, though since I haven’t unlocked it yet I can only speculate.  I would imagine it’s a “get as far as you can” type scenario, given the way the game as a whole works.  You can earn achievements, but it appears to be a home grown system as opposed to something like OpenFeint.  My one achievement so far is “50 Falls”, so you have some idea of how skilled I am at this game.  There is also an online leader board you can submit your scores to if you have an internet connection.  I’m pretty sure I’ll never be in the running for top contender there.

Let's Hear It For The Boys...

While the game play is 2D the graphics are nicely rendered in 3D.  The levels have lots of cool details if you can spare a few seconds to look around.  Signs are almost legible, vending machines look full, and all kinds of details abound.  I love seeing the Statue Of Liberty on the New York level, though my favorite background element so far is the bear passed out on the ground in the Russia level.  The character looks really good as well, and the animation is lifelike and fluid.  The only thing that’s a bit creepy is when she wipes out, because then the game sort of goes into “ragdoll” mode and some of the positions look extremely painful.

The sound effects are actually really good in this game.  I love the sound the springs make when you impact with the ground, and I also really appreciate the fact that the stilts make different noises when they impact with different things.  It would have been so easy to cheat in a game like this and have one sound for everything, assuming people wouldn’t pay that much attention to such trivialities.  The moan the character makes when she hits the ground makes it even harder to watch her body crumple up.  The music gets a bit repetitive after a while, but it’s not bad either.  It has sort of a jazzy exercise beat to it.

The first time I played Jump-O-Mania I really wasn’t sure what to make of it, but now I realize it’s a quick to play, easy to get hooked on jump ‘n trick game that will challenge you.  There’s no magic or mysticism to the controls, but there’s definitely something required to master the game.  If you’re looking for a “not-so-endless keep running” game that’s a bit different from the norm, Jump-O-Mania might just be your thing.  I’m glad I got the chance to try it.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Back then it might have been more original, but nowadays it’s your clichéd story where you are the chosen one, the only person that can save the princess from the clutches of the evil tyrant.  The story gets fleshed out in bits and pieces by the underground dwellers, but not to any great extent.  The story isn’t overly compelling, but just like in the original Legend Of Zelda, it’s not really that important.  The main thing is that you get to traverse an over world conquering monsters in real time combat.  Then you get to enter underground areas where you can conquer more monsters in side scrolling or vertical scrolling fashion.  There are also people you can visit below the surface that will give you potions and other things to help you on your journey.

Blue Snakes?

Once I finally defeated the boss in the first area I was treated to a second section that was much bigger in scope.  It was at this point I realized a map would be nice.  I’m not sure if you ever find one in the game, but one can hope.  As you wander around you’ll discover that almost all the entrances to the various under world areas are initially hidden, and you have to kill at least one or two monsters in a room to open them.  The whole monster thing is interesting, because you only get two monsters at a time, but as soon as one is killed or leaves the screen, another one spawns in its place.  You also get gold from each kill (as far as I can tell), but you don’t actually have to pick it up.  This feature is actually kind of nice, and I wish more games would employ such a tactic.

It all sounds well and good, and actually sounds a lot like the original Legend Of Zelda, but the game falls apart when you must actually move your character around to do all these things.  On the left is a virtual d-pad, which quite frankly is sluggish and easy to “slip off” of.  This isn’t very helpful anywhere, but it’s especially bad when you have a sequence where the level is constantly moving whether or not you’re actually stuck.  The attack button is a little round button on the right side, and while mostly not bad, it’s easy to lose sight of when you’re in the heat of battle.  If this were a turn based game the controls might be okay, but since its real time action they really make the game play suffer, especially when it comes to fighting bosses.

More Snakes... But Bigger

I can’t decide if the highlight of the game is the graphics or the music.  The graphics aren’t great, but then they were created 20+ years ago, and I’m sure they shined in their time.  I still like them though, especially the tiles used for the backgrounds and the portraits of the NPCs you encounter.  The creatures themselves leave a bit to be desired, and while a bit more detailed than what you’d find in the first Zelda, they lack character.  On the other hand, I’m quite impressed with the quality of the music.  I could actually see this soundtrack being used for a modern game, and it’s certainly better than a large percentage of the ones I’ve heard on the many iPhone games I’ve played.

This game has a lot going for it, and once I beat my head against the wall enough and got past the first section, I began to realize why they had the nerve to compare it to Zelda.  However, in order for this port to be considered decent in my opinion, they really need to revamp the controls.  The thing is, as I pondered this dilemma more and more, I realized that with revamped controls this is definitely a game I could sink my teeth into.  As a result, I’ve decided to change my original verdict of Not Recommended to…

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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Lots Of Choices

As OddBlob your mission in life is simply to get from the area of stars where you start to the area of stars at the other end of each level.  Along the way there are various fruits and other items of food you can eat, but none of those are essential to your survival.  There are also hearts you can snag, and those are good because they give you an extra life.  There are also clocks you can pick up, and I think what those do is give you some extra time before the level starts crumbling behind you.  Finally there are pieces of cake, and if you happen to snag one of those you’ll get to a bonus level.  On the bonus level you get one move to try and reach another piece of cake.  If you do you get a bonus, and either way you then get dumped back to your regularly scheduled game.

Your main obstacles are pits that cause you to fall to your death and walls that block your passage.  You can get around both of these things with well placed jumps, but be sure that you’re jumping over or away from them, and not into them!  The final problem is that the level is slowly crumbling away behind you, which you won’t notice right away but will become painfully obvious after a while, especially if you’re playing on the highest difficulty level.  Just make sure you keep moving forward at a brisk pace, and you shouldn’t fall away like the fabled Atlantis.

To help – or potentially hinder – your progress, several of the tiles have springs on them in the form of arrows and circles.  Arrows launch you in the direction the arrow is pointing, and you’ll travel either one or two tiles depending on if the arrow is single or double.  Once an arrow is used it goes away and the tile becomes ordinary.  Circles keep you moving in the same direction as you were traveling when you landed on them, and once again either boost you one or two tiles depending on if there are one or two circles.  Unlike arrows, circles do not go away.  The fun part of “spring” tiles is when you land on one that catapults you into another… then another… The down side, however, is when the last catapult sends you into a pit.  That’s never a good thing.

The game has two modes of play (though I haven’t really figured out the difference between them yet), and there are score boards for both modes.  In addition there are several OpenFeint achievements, and there’s an in-game menu to see them (called Awards) so that you don’t actually have to go into OpenFeint.  One thing I like about the awards in this game is that for the ones where you have to collect so many of something, they actually tell you how many you’ve collected.  Progress meters are nice.

Visually this feels like the spiritual successor to Platypus.  The objects are all rendered from clay, and even though it doesn’t necessarily produce the crispest, most detailed sprites, there’s something about the look of clay that can’t be beat.  The blob is well animated, though the rest of the game is lacking in that department.  Still, I love the look and it’s a nice change of pace from cartoony or doodle-like.  The sound is okay, but the best part of it, which is the noises the blob makes, is highly underused.  The music is actually pretty good, and it reminds me of a cross between two things, but I just can’t quite place what those two things are.

I’m not going to tell you there’s a whole lot going on here either revolutionary or even evolutionary, because there’s not.  What I will say, however, is that this is a solid game with simple mechanics that becomes quite challenging when you try to determine the course that will give you the most points as the level goes crumbling away behind you.  And yes, I took about 3 breaths during that last sentence!  Anyway, OddBlob is a great time waster with a cute character and plenty of clay food to munch on.  It’s also a universal application, and as of this writing it’s only 99 cents, so you win all around.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Crime Alley

Police Range has two modes – Target Practice and Crime Alley.  Target Practice is first and foremost about hitting a certain number of targets, but secondly it’s about accuracy.  You get points for at least hitting the cardboard target at all, but you score more points if you hit the outline of the figure and even more if you hit a “kill zone”.  It takes a while for this mode to get up and going, but once the required number of targets gets between 40 and 50 the targets start popping up fast and furious like, and you will start missing some.  Thankfully once you’ve passed certain levels you can start at those levels, because while the beginning levels are good for easy points, they aren’t all that exciting.

Crime Alley is the typical scenario where you have a building with people popping in the windows, and you have to shoot the bad guys and not shoot the civilians.  Hitting one of the innocent doesn’t automatically mean you lose, but try not to do that too often.  Overall I find this to be the more interesting scenario of the two, but the visuals can be a bit of a detriment sometimes.  The stylized black and white drawings look cool, but the civilians can look deceptively like the bad guys if you aren’t paying close enough attention.  Add to that the fact that the weapons often blend in with the bad guys and you might do more than your fair share of accidentally shooting the good guys.  Guess I just need some more practice – thankfully they have a range for that!

The game has score boards for both modes, and it also supports OpenFeint.  Thankfully as part of what appears to be a growing trend, Police Range has it’s own screen to show our achievements as well so you don’t have to enter the OpenFeint interface if you don’t want to.  Most of the achievements are of the “I reached level X in one game” or “I’ve beaten X number of levels altogether” variety, but there are a couple of interesting ones.  My favorite is the award for hitting each type of civilian at least once in the same game.  Not sure if that means I’m terrible at the game or I know what I’m aiming for!

The graphics won’t “wow” you, but they aren’t bad either.  The background in Target Practice mode is a bit sparse, but Crime Alley is pretty decent, and the targets themselves look good.  Of course the targets in Crime Alley are much more detailed, so overall I’d say Crime Alley has the better look, which is fine since that’s the more interesting scenario anyway.  I do like some of the special effects like when the cards chip or just get blown to smithereens as they are shot.  Sound is basically a matter of shots being fired and your gun reloading, as I suppose it would be out of place for cardboard targets to scream.  On the other hand, some background music, even if it was subtle, would definitely take care of the intermittent silence.  You can listen to your own tunes, but the Muppets and Hannah Montana don’t really seem like good background music for a shooting gallery game.

I suppose some of the lack of dynamism in Police Range might be due to a desire to make the game feel somewhat authentic, but the end result is that it’s nothing more than a solid but average game.  Granted the Target Practice mode does get more interesting when things go chaotic and the visuals in Crime Alley are neat, but there’s nothing to really differentiate Police Range from dozens of other shooting games I’ve played.  If you’ve gotta have ‘em all then there’s nothing wrong with adding this one to your collection, but there are more interesting choices out there.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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Here Comes The Lightning

The object of the game is to make matches of three or more balls of the same color.  Sound familiar?  That’s about where the similarities between Steamballs and regular match 3 games end.  Instead of some sort of playing field filled with objects, the game board is comprised of a series of tubes at the top of the screen that contain the balls, and a series of scales at the bottom of the screen.  Your job is to swipe the balls from the tubes one at a time to rest in the scales below.

Furthermore, you have to balance out the scales such that three or more balls of the same color line up in a row in order to make a match.  Each regular ball has a weight, and as you drop the balls on the scales the total weights for each arm are displayed under the scales.  The cool thing is that as long as three balls of the same color match at a given point it counts, so as the scales are adjusting to balance the weight at any given time you could make a match.  This is the only way to get points for your matches.  If there are balls touching the matching row that are of the same color, they will disappear as well.  There are no diagonal matches in the game, and vertical matches must consist of at least 5 balls of the same color, which will disappear but not award you with any points.

In addition to the normal balls there is a variety of power up balls.  Some balls will get rid of other balls when they are dropped.  One ball changes the color of all balls on an arm to the color of the ball underneath the power up.  Another ball gives you bonus points when you make a match with balls that are touching the power up.  There are a number of different power ups at your disposal, each having great merit when used wisely.  Overall this game is much more strategy based than most match 3 games, and has a slower pace as a result.  I find it to be quite refreshing.

The controls are real simple in premise – drag the active ball back and forth to move between tubes and swipe downwards to launch the ball towards a scale.  Seems simple enough, but I often find that due to the relatively narrow tubes my ball is not in the right spot when I launch, which I don’t realize until it’s too late.  Ideally an undo would be nice, but if nothing else maybe an alternate way to drop the ball so that you can move your hand out of the way and be sure you’re in the right position.  On the other hand, I do like the fact that you can tap on a ball to get the details about what it does.  This feature seems a bit sensitive, though, as it tends to pop up a lot more frequently than I ask for it.

A Steam Bomb!

While not as slick as certain other offerings like Gold Keeper or Jump-O-Mania, the visuals in Steamballs definitely have a charm about them.  The whole steampunk atmosphere is cool, and the effects correlating to some of the power ups are pretty sweet.  One thing I will give them credit for is that so far I have not had any issues mistaking one color for another, which seems to be a common problem with matching games that rely on the same objects with different colors.

The sound effects actually suit the game quite well.  The power ups that emit steam or electricity sound pretty good, and there’s a useful if not potentially annoying alarm when you’ve got at least one column too close to the top.  The noise made when rows or columns are match is rather interesting as well.  The music for both the menu and in-game are nice, but I think I like the menu music a bit better.  The in-game music sounds a bit like the background to a detective mystery, while the menu music is just cool.  I don’t even know how to describe it, but I could listen to it for a long stretch without getting bored.

There’s no question that Steamballs ups the ante as far as what’s possible for a match 3 game without resorting to mixing with other genres.  The game still feels like a match 3 game, yet there’s enough strategy involved that it’s also something completely different.  If you’re a match 3 fan that’s not afraid to try something different, or someone that isn’t necessarily into match 3 games already, you definitely need to give this game a try.  For everyone else, try it anyway.  You might just like it.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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The Signpost Up Ahead

The premise behind the game is simple.  Each board is a shape, and you have to cut away at that shape by drawing a line from one edge of the shape to another.  A successfully drawn line will cause part of the shape to fall away, and when enough of the shape is gone you’ve beaten the level.  The trick is that each board has a number of balls bouncing around in it, and you can only get rid of parts of the shape that don’t contain any balls.  If both sections of the divided shape have balls in them then nothing changes.  If a ball hits the line while you’re drawing it, the shape will be completely restored and you’ll have to start over again.  To add to the challenge, some of the shapes have partially white boarders.  You can’t draw a line through the white boarders, so you have to go around them.  In order to complete a level you must remove a certain percentage of the board.  Thankfully there’s no time limit, so try to plan your moves wisely.

Controlling the game is simple.  Touch the screen where you want to start the line, then drag to where you want the line to end and release.  If the line is successful you’ll see one of the two sections fall away.  If both sections have balls in them you’ll hear a distinct noise and nothing happens.  The levels are extremely well designed, though I’m not sure the difficulty is balanced very well.  It seems like I’ll often get a really difficult level followed by a level I can beat on the first try.  It would also be nice if they had a “beginner” level where you didn’t have to remove such a high percentage of the level in order to win.  On the plus side, if you do complete the levels there are three different medals you can earn, so if you have the patience there’s plenty of replayability as you try to get the gold medal on each level.  It appears you can only retry a level until you decide to move on to the next one, however, so to add to the replay factor a level select screen would be awesome.

I love the visual style in iSlice.  The background elements are a mixture of what look like cardboard cutouts and counter cross-stitched objects, and the playing field mimics the cross-stitch style.  The playing field is also a recognizable object that fits with the theme of the background.  There’s even a nifty little life saying written on each of the objects.  The sound effects are simple but fitting.  A snip sound means you’ve successfully sliced the object, a light tapping means it didn’t work, and a thump indicates you’ve hit a wall.  The endearing sound of shattered glass says that your line has been shattered by a ball.  The music has a bit of a bluegrass edge to it, and at first makes you feel like you’re in a Countrytime lemonade commercial.

I’m pretty impressed with iSlice.  Technically the game is simple to play, yet there’s no question that it provides a nice challenge.  The levels are beatable without getting too agitating (most of the time), and you always feel good about completing one.  The visuals are slick and the music is good, though it would be nice to have more than one song.  If you’re looking for the next challenging casual game, this just might be it.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Basically you play Babeorella, who happens to be on a quest to crush alien robots of all shapes and sizes.  She’ll do this with everything from a whip to a hammer, and a lot of firepower to boot (and her boots, for that matter).  You’ll spend your time running around a fairly contained area, demolishing everything in sight and collecting power ups as they arise.  Every killed robot earns you experience points, and you can also collect XP boosters from one of the various power up spawn points on the board (I think aliens might leave them as well on occasion).  These XP points allow you to upgrade things such as long and short range attacks, as well as maximum health and number of bombs you can have.

Pullin' Out The Big Guns

In addition to earning XP you can earn awards, which are basically the home grown equivalent of OpenFeint achievements.  Earn enough awards and you can unlock new outfits for Babeorella.  Finally there are the challenges, which for a while are the most interesting part of the game.  When you get a challenge you have a certain amount of time in which you must earn enough XP to upgrade a particular stat.  If you are able to beat the challenge you’ll earn a multiplier on your XP, which in turn helps you earn stats more quickly.  It’s pretty gimmicky, and actually quite cool for a while, but I’d imagine if it helped you earn all of your upgrades too quickly you’d be at a loss for more to do.  Fortunately I haven’t hit that dilemma yet.

To move Babeorella you have a virtual joystick in the lower left corner of the screen.  This works pretty well for the first few waves, but when the action gets intense and you need to run a lot the control suffers big time from the “slip factor”, the problem where you slide your finger too far and suddenly the joystick isn’t responding any more.  You have two strengths of attack – light and heavy – and three ranges for each (short, medium and long).  Each attack strength is controlled with one button, and the range is determined by the distance between you and the enemy.  This means you must be facing the enemy, unlike the traditional dual stick shooter where you can rotate your weapon as appropriate.  Otherwise I like the fact that you don’t have to worry about switching weapons.

It's Hammer Time (and that's not punny)

Visually Babeorella looks really nice – and I am talking about the game as a whole.  Babeorella can definitely hold her own against Daisy Mae, and the robots look pretty cool, though not as nifty as the alien entries from the buffet.  Animations are well done, and the background is nifty.  The big problem is lack of variety.  The game needs more robot types, and it would be really nice she moved to a new locale every few waves.  This could also help vary the game play a bit, as different terrains present new challenges.  The sound effects are decent enough.  Some things like the heavy gun powering up sound pretty cool, and other things like the hammer noises are almost comical.  The music is good, but like the background it could use a change every once in a while.

I have somewhat mixed emotions on Babeorella.  On one hand, the virtual joystick really drives me nuts.  The button configuration as opposed to virtual joystick has its issues as well, especially when you’re being swarmed from all sides.  The game can even get kind of stale with only 5 robot types and one backdrop.  On the flip side, I can still find myself coming back to this game until such time as I’ve managed to win all the awards and unlock the three corresponding costumes.  Still, that experience would be much more pleasant if the items in the rest of this paragraph were addressed.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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Super 7 – I wasn’t really interested in this game, but AppSmile had it in their weekly contest, and it was the only one for that week that I didn’t have that might have appealed to me, so I entered the contest and won a copy.  It turns out the game is actually quite fun and addictive.  It’s line drawing, but instead of vehicles or creatures or people, you’re drawing lines between discs with numbers on them.  The goal is that you end up with discs containing the number 7.  Make a combination that’s higher than 7 or lower than -7 and you lose.  It doesn’t take long before the action gets quick and furious, and things like number multipliers / dividers and sign changers can really throw a wrench in your plans – or prove immensely beneficial.  The graphics are pretty snazzy for mainly being discs with numbers on them, and the music is quite upbeat and nice to listen to.  If you think you’ve played it all when it comes to line drawing, you really need to give this one a shot.

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Racer – This is a simple car racing game where you’re driving down a multi-lane highway and you basically need to stay alive as long as you can.  To steer the car you drag it where you want to go – left and right to switch lanes and forward and back to move faster and slower.  There are two freestyle modes (one harder than the other), a “slots” mode which is basically freestyle where you need to collect stars for bonus points, and “career” mode which is slots with a goal of so many stars per level.  While not jaw dropping the graphics are certainly appealing, and the crashing and screeching when you hit a car are sure authentic.  Some music would be nice, but otherwise this is a solid if a bit simplistic little racer that has actually managed to hold my attention.

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Yipe 5 – I bought this a while back and just now got around to trying it.  As luck would have it the game is actually pretty fun.  It’s very old school RPG, from the interface to the lack of character customization, but for some quick tile based dungeon exploring it does the job.  The graphics are colorful, combat is quick yet satisfying, and the whole thing is easy to pick up and get into.  Besides, where else are you going to get to fight zombie rabbits and zombie chickens in the same game?

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Well there you have it.  Three cool games in no particular order that can easily keep you busy for minutes at a time!  Racer is free as of this posting (6/18/2010), so if you don’t have it yet, now would be a really good time to grab it.

The Future Is Now...

The premise behind the game is really simple – you need to make sure the ball gets to the end of the level without hitting any obstacles or falling through any holes.  The ball is constantly rolling, and the only control you have is to make it jump by tapping the screen.  As you might expect, then, the key to doing well in the game is timing.  Of course I have no sense of timing, which makes this type of game particularly difficult for me, but with great challenge comes great reward, right?  Something else you have to be conscious of is that in some places even though it might seem like you need to jump, you might just want to fall.  The levels are short, so experimentation isn’t the end of the world.  Just don’t play like me and do the same thing 100 times just because you’re sure one time it’s going to work.

Along the way there are stars to collect in order to earn extra points.  You might miss one or two every now and again, but if you seem to be missing the majority of them then you’re probably doing something wrong, because the stars are laid out in such a way that they are reachable just by following the natural course of the level.  I think there are one or two occasions where the level splits and you can only follow one path, but that is a rarity.  There are a couple of things that will help you when you come across them.  Certain signs can speed you up, slow you down, or cause you to reverse direction.  There are also certain tiles that cause you to jump higher than normal.  While you may have the urge to jump over these things at times when you see them, they are almost always there for a good reason, so try to use them when possible.

When The Moon Hits Your Eye...

The visuals are quite a step up from the first game.  Right off the bat you’ll note that there are actually two different themes you can play with: cartoon and futuristic.  Personally I like cartoon a little better, but they’re both pretty nice.  The objects you jump over look to be the same for both, but platform tiles, signs and backdrops change when you pick a different theme.  Yes, this iteration of Fastball has backdrops!  The one on the cartoon theme even changes between day and night.  Cool!  Sound effects are there, which is better than nothing, though I do like the noise the ball makes when it speeds up.  The music is really cool, and there are actually three tunes – one for the menu, and one for each theme.  Like with the visuals I prefer the cartoon music, which for some reason makes me feel like I should be at a café somewhere in Paris.

This is still probably one of the more basic “rolling ball” games that’s actually fun, but I can’t deny that I get hooked on it.  Whenever I start a level I almost can’t put the game down until I get the level finished.  You will probably have to make several attempts at many of the levels, but like I said they’re short, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.  Hopefully decent sales will encourage the developer to add a couple more themes, but the game is pretty solid as it stands right now.  If you’re looking for a nice, simple variant of games like Bounce On or Funkyball Worlds, this would be a great title to pick up.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

Sorter

The initial review request I received for this game claimed that it was “as or even more addicting” than Fruit Ninja.  As big a fan of Fruit Ninja as I am that meant I had to give this a try.  While I’m not quite sure I agree with this assessment, there is definitely something about Sorter that hooks you in and tries not to let you go.  The mechanics couldn’t be simpler, yet at the same time it doesn’t take long on any particular level before the action gets frantic and mistakes become easy to make.  If you’re looking for a fun, challenging game that will easily draw you in, look no further than Sorter.

The idea is simply to sort bombs into their appropriate color bins.  It’s kind of like a line drawing game under micro-management because there are no lines.  Instead you actually have to guide each bomb all the way to its bin.  This actually provides a unique challenge, because as the game gets faster bombs can pile up while you’re dragging each one to its destination.  On the plus side, bombs aren’t affected by hitting each other, so you don’t have to worry about that.  What is a concern, however, is the fact that each bomb has a timer, and when the timer goes off the bomb explodes.  Then it’s game over.  As you’re dragging bombs around you have to be cognizant of which ones have been in play the longest and take care of those first.

Look At All The Colors

There are two power ups to help you out.  One will cause all bombs of the like color to automatically go to the appropriate bin once you drag the power up to the bin.  You can drag the other one to any bin, and all bombs currently in play will be sorted to their appropriate places.  The game only has six levels, and each level has bronze, silver and gold medals that you can earn based on points.  You have to earn at least a silver medal to move on to the next level, and I’m still working on level 2.  Once you unlock all six levels the game really becomes a matter of trying to beat your highest score, or if you’re really competitive trying to beat the score of all the other OpenFeint players.  Once you start playing the game I think you’ll get that competitive urge.

The graphics are pretty simple, but the game still looks good.  I like how each bomb is its own timer, and sections of the bomb get lighter as its time is running out.  There aren’t any real snazzy effects at any point, even when a bomb explodes, but they’re not really necessary for this type of game.  The sound effects are pretty much there to have sound effects.  When a bomb is about ready to blow you get a beep warning, and while it’s useful it can also be a bit distracting.  The music is pretty decent, and does a good job of keeping you pumped up.

So has this become my new addiction over Fruit Ninja?  Not really, but it sure is fun.  And it does have the qualities needed to become addictive.  Maybe I just need to play it a few more times to find out…

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Buzz2 Chaos

I don’t get overly excited about “spot the difference” style games.  They can be entertaining in short bursts, however, and this particular one is actually quite interesting.  The artwork stands out from the crowd, at times the differences can be almost too subtle, and there are a couple of extras thrown in that can really make the game challenging.  I’m still not a big fan of the concept, but there’s plenty of merit to Buzz2 Chaos.

The game only has 11 levels, but once a level has been unlocked you can play it to your heart’s content.  The pictures are shared across all levels, but the amount of time and obstacles you encounter change with each new level.  You start with 15 seconds to find a difference, and the time decreases as you progress through the levels.  In and of itself that’s not quite so bad, but when you combine that with the mostly annoying 3 second count down it can get a bit nerve-racking on the higher levels.  You must spot 15 differences (one per picture) to move on to the next level, and once the rabbit has eaten all the carrots the game is over.  I’m not really sure exactly when the rabbit eats a carrot, but I’m thinking it eats part of one for each incorrect guess or flat out missed guess.

Get The Giraffe

The “obstacles” consist of twisting the pictures and animals.  By “twisting the pictures” I mean that one picture might be upside down compared to the other, or it might be a mirror image of the other picture.  As for the animals you have a giraffe, a turtle and a bee.  On the levels where they are present they will just periodically show up to cover part of the screen.  To get rid of the giraffe you simply tap it.  The turtle must be swiped off the screen, and the bee simply can’t be touched.  Sometimes they can be annoying – especially when they cover up a difference – but for the most part they are just an amusing distraction.

The graphics in Buzz2 Chaos are great.  Now I realize you’d expect that out of this type of game, but there’s something about this collection of images in particular that I find quite entertaining.  I suppose it has something to do with the fact that the subject matter ranges from a somewhat silly wedding photo to a picture of various dessert items with attitudes.  There’s no obvious connection between any of the images except that they are goofy.  I also love the expression of the giraffe when you tap it out.  The sound effects are kind of annoying, but at least the “you’re about to lose” timer does its job of encouraging you to speed up your search, if for no other reason than the timer will stop.  There really isn’t any music except for when the game first starts and when you finish a level, but this might be one of those rare instances where music would be more distracting than helpful.

While I’m not going to run out and download every “spot the difference” game as a result of playing Buzz2 Chaos, I must say this one has a certain charm about it.  Maybe I just like smacking annoying giraffes across the face, who knows (PETA, don’t email me)?  Whatever the case, I would definitely suggest checking this out if you like this type of game, and even if you don’t it might be worth your while.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Well, that’s it for this week.  Next week definitely won’t happen on Saturday, but given some other obligations it might not happen at all.  Either way, the Saturday Specials will return again soon.  Thanks for reading!

The basic premise is simple – match 3 or more tiles of the same color.  To highlight a group you tap on it, and to finalize your selection you tap it again.  The caveat here is that the playing field isn’t flat, nor is it a cube.  It’s actually a cylinder that has multiple levels of tiles on it.  So, not only do you have to worry about keeping track of a revolving surface, you also have to be cognizant of the depth of tiles, because even though you can match across multiple depths there has to be a continuous path between all tiles in a group.  This actually makes for some really interesting strategy, especially when it comes to logic mode where you only “get what you get” when you start the game.

Speaking of modes, the game has two different modes of play.  The first is Logic, where you’re presented with a completely full cylinder and you have to get rid of as many tiles as you can.  This mode is actually rather slow paced and requires a bit more thought, but it can be rather rewarding.  You also get a bit of help in this mode in the form of two buttons – one allows you to change the color of a tile and the other lets you delete tiles.  Keep in mind that these actions reduce your score, however.  The other node is Dynamic.  In this mode the cylinder starts with one layer of tiles, and starts adding on layers tile by tile while you’re trying to get rid of tiles.  Once you’ve cleared a certain number of tiles your level goes up, and tile placement gets faster.  I prefer this mode, but unfortunately this is where you mainly see the “flaw” I mentioned in the beginning.

So what is this “flaw” I keep bringing up?  The cylinder is comprised of several circles, each of which can be rotated separately by dragging one finger along the circle you wish to rotate.  To rotate the entire cylinder you execute a two finger drag.  If you want to shift the perspective of the cylinder a bit you can tilt the device, allowing you to see “inside” the cylinder to an extent.  The tilt rotation can be locked down by clicking the lock button in the lower right corner of the screen.  These controls all work well and seem pretty responsive.  The problem comes when actually attempting to select tiles for matching.  Usually the first tap to select a group works okay, but once in a while it seems like that isn’t even recognized.  However, quite often the game doesn’t recognize my second tap, especially when the levels get faster.  As a result I often have to tap 3, 4 or more times to clear a group of tiles away, and sometimes in between the first and nth tap a tile of a different color pops up and blows my match.  You can see why this wouldn’t be such an issue in logic mode, but in dynamic mode it can be downright devastating.

Though there’s not a whole lot going on, Color Swing still looks pretty sharp visually.  The cylinder looks good as it’s spinning around, and there’s just enough of a sparkle when you clear a match so the playing field doesn’t feel dead.  The sound effects serve their purpose mainly in terms of letting you know when you’ve tapped something that doesn’t constitute a match.  There is no music, and while you can play your iTunes collection, the game really needs some built in music, especially for logic mode.

Color Swing puts a fresh new spin on the match 3 concept.  The game looks good and for the most part plays well.  I so want to give this a “Recommended”, but the fact that I have so much difficulty at times double tapping matches prevents me from doing so.  I still suggest that you check it out, however, because you might have a better experience on your device than I’ve had with mine.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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[All About Quick Looks]

So what happens when the listener wants to improve the overall sound quality?

Most people would automatically think about replacing the whole package with a higher quality digital music player and headphones.  Fortunately this is not the only option. You can invest in higher quality headphones to start. This means a better pair of headphones of any type.

The types available are:

• in ear as in earbuds
• around the ear as in headsets
• on top of the ear as in earpads

There does not seem to be an industry standard as to the naming scheme from what I have seen. There are terms like open back and closed back but these terms do not specifically indicate the size of the headphone cups.

One type I wanted to do a Quick Look on are earbuds that are custom molded to your ears made by JH Audio. So what’s so speciak about the JH Audio custom earbuds since there are a few other custom molded earbuds on the market like:

• Westone
• Earsound
• Ultimate Ears

First, I want to make a quick comparison between general headphones and home stereo speakers. Headphones in general have one driver or speaker for each ear. high end speakers or quality home speakers have 2 or 3 speakers built into one cabinet. It is not as simple as attaching 2 or 3 speakers to one connection cable and placing them into a cabinet. There are precise physics involved based on the cabinet size, size of the speakers and what is called a crossover circuitry which is added to the package to produce the quality sound in 2-way and 3-way speaker systems.

 The interesting design incorporated into the JH Audio custom earbuds  utilizes the similar physics used in home stereo speaker design by adding a 3-way speaker system within the earbuds. This means 3 separate speakers inside the earbud.

low end frequency speaker (Woofer)

mid range frequency speaker (Mid range)

high end frequency speaker (Tweeter)

What’s even more exciting is that the JH 13 Pro includes two speakers per frequency range with the integrated 3-way crossover in this tiny in-ear custom molded earbud. If that was not enough, the frequwncy range of these earbuds range from 10 Hz to 20 kHz which is much lower than what most people can even hear.

 I have not actually tried these earbuds myself since I would require an audiologist to create a custom mold first and then have these molds sent to JH Audio for custom manufacturing of these earbuds. From all the specifications and testimonials I have read about these earbuds, I am certainly intrigued with these earbuds. I would certainly put these earbuds on my wish list for Christmas. The cost is $1099.00 USD for the earbuds plus the cost of the custom molds to be made by an audiologist at anywhere from $100 – $200 in most cases. This does not seem like pocket change but where else can you get home stereo like specs for a pair of earbuds? It’s like getting a 3-way loud speaker with 6 speakers inside each ear.  Just reading the specifications alone makes my mouth water.

Certainly JH Audio has gone above and beyond your typical earbud design and not only provided a custom molded earbud but also some very sophisticated ealectronics inside each earbud. Anyone can insert a pair of earbuds inside a molded case but not anyone has the 6 drivers and a 3-way crossover inside such a small package. Those that can afford the pricetag of a JH Audio earbuds should consider looking into these earbuds. JH Audio seems to have many satisfied customers from all the testimontials showcased online. You can find out more about the JH 13 Pro and other JH Audio professional products at JH Audio.

Look Out For The Thing!

If you’ve ever played Scoops you’ll be immediately familiar with the basic game play.  You are the cat, and your job is to catch all of the objects that are falling from the sky.  You start with a fishbowl on your head, complete with water and a fish.  You tilt the device back and forth such that your hat is under the objects so they can rest on top of the pile that will build up on your hat.  Every time you catch a fishbowl it will destroy all the objects on top of the highest fishbowl on your hat, and at that time you’ll score points equivalent to 10 times the current multiplier for each object.  Then the multiplier goes up by one.

You can miss objects without any penalty.  However, you can only miss three fishbowls before the game is over.  Occasionally a thing (thing 1 or thing 2) will drop from the sky, and you want to avoid them.  If you accidentally catch one of them all the objects on your stack will be destroyed (except for fishbowls), but you won’t get any points.  That’s all there is to the game.  It’s nice and simple, but the kids should really enjoy it.  For that matter, I actually think it’s kind of fun.  It could definitely stand some incentives, however, like maybe achievements via OpenFeint integration or something.

The graphics are pure Dr. Seuss, as only seems fitting.  In fact, it almost looks like the artist traced images right from the pages of the Dr. Seuss books.  Some may find the style a bit old fashioned, but personally I think that’s part of the charm.  I also love how the background patterns fade out and in every once in a while to reveal a new design.  While a basic premise, changing the background is something that’s often neglected in simpler games, yet it’s amazing how something so trite can keep you from getting bored with the visuals.  All that’s really lacking is much in the way of animation.  There’s a bit when objects are destroyed with a “poof”, but the stillness of everything is so painfully obvious as you drop the last fishbowl and get to see the cat, which is basically a static image.

The sound effects in Up With A Fish are great.  The funny thing is they aren’t even anything out of the ordinary.  However, the developer did something that so many are too lazy to do, especially with a simple game like this – they made the sound effects fit the objects.  How many games do you play where every gun sounds the same, or all the monsters sound alike?  It’s refreshing to hear a unique noise for each object that lands on the pile.  The only negative is the grating noise the things make.  I still haven’t decided what it sounds like, but it’s not pleasant.  The music certainly fits the atmosphere, and I can almost picture the cat dancing along to the tune.  I know I certainly find my head bobbing with the beat from time to time.

Up With A Fish doesn’t break any new ground, and there’s really not a whole lot to the game.  What it does is provide good, solid fun in a simple package.  Plus, it gives you something that you can enjoy with your kids with no worries about exposing them to anything they shouldn’t see.  And if you happen to slip in a few games on your own while no one else is looking…

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

Rack Up The Combos

This is one of those games where rows of objects – in this case, viruses – head towards the top of the screen, and it’s your job to stop them.  You click on groups of three or more viruses (2 in puzzle mode) to make them disappear.  Surrounding viruses will shift over, tumble down, or whatever they need to in order to fill in the gaps left behind.  So where’s the genius?  It lies in how two of the three game modes – Arcade and Puzzle – work together.  But we’ll get to that in a second.  First we’ll go over what normally for me is the “boring” mode.  That’s the one that developers called Endless most times.  I don’t really care for this mode because there doesn’t seem to be a point to it, and Virus Laboratory is no exception in that department.  Basically you play until you can’t play any more, with no levels, nothing to earn, blah, blah, blah.  Now onto the good stuff.

First there is Puzzle mode.  In this mode there are a series of levels you must play sequentially.  Each level has a set number of viruses on it, and you have a certain number of moves to clear all the viruses away.  In this mode you can unlock new viruses and new medicines.  This is the mode for smart people, so while I like get new stuff to play with, I prefer Arcade mode just because I’m better at it.  Arcade mode is really the crux of this game anyway.  At the beginning of each game in arcade mode you can select 4 different viruses and 3 different medicines to use.  You’ll note that the viruses and medicines each have a number next to them, denoting how many of them you have.  How do you earn viruses?  You just have to play Arcade mode!  Each successful match adds the corresponding number of that color virus to your stash.  As for the medicines, you get more of them by combining different viruses in the Store Room screen.  Basically, as you unlock new medicines you decide which ones you like the best, and then play with the necessary viruses to make those medicines.  Now do you see why this particular variant of such an overworked concept is so cool?

So what do these medicines do?  Well, so far the ones I’ve unlocked are mostly used to remove groups of viruses, such as rows or columns.  However, one of them actually completely rearranges the placement of all the viruses currently on screen.  They’re pretty easy to use as well.  You just drag them from the bar at the top of the screen and place them where you want to use them.  Of course the rearrangement medicine will affect the whole screen no matter where you place it.  It’s a good idea before you start a round of Arcade mode to check the Store Room and see what your medicine levels are, because you only get what you take in at the beginning of the game, and you can’t make more medicine until the next game.

The graphics in Virus Laboratory have a nice cartoon like quality, which seems to be the modus operandi for Taplay – and I’m perfectly okay with that.  The viruses look like cousins of the Fairly Oddparents, and I’m pretty sure the scientists were extras from the movie Monsters Inc.  The background has a nifty blood stream type vibe to it, and there’s plenty of action from the viruses, whether it’s a column shaking that’s too close to the top, viruses bouncing as they fall to fill in gaps, or the leftovers exploding when a level is complete.  The one thing I would have liked to have seen was some random animation in the faces of the viruses.  They’re cute but awfully static.  The sound effects are okay, comprised mostly of popping viruses and a buzzer when you click a group of viruses that can’t be removed.  The music, on the other hand, needs to seriously be reworked.  It sounds like it’s about 10 notes in a loop, and it’s really annoying.

This is one of those games where I entered a contest to get a promo code simply because I wanted another free game.  In the end, though, it turned out that I got a game that’s quite enjoyable, even though I’m not really a fan of the particular style of game play it employs.  The game looks great, and there’s plenty to do between OpenFeint achievements, 3 different game play modes, and attempting to unlock all the viruses and medicines.  If you like Jawbreaker style games there’s no question this should be in your collection, but even if you don’t I suggest giving it a try, because I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

Flip And Clear

The concept is quite simple. The game board is divided into 6 columns, and a series of objects will descend from the top of the screen in each of those six columns. You can launch an object at the oncoming wall, and once that object hits the wall you can launch another one. The key is that each object in the wall is a certain color, and when you match 3 or more of a color either horizontally or vertically, all the objects of that color that are touching your match will go away. The goal is to keep the wall from reaching the bottom of the screen for as long as you can. Here’s where the twist comes in – each object is really actually two colors.

Yep, now you know the secret. If you tap an object you can flip it over, revealing a different color on the other side. All the pieces on the board can be flipped, the object that you’re launching can be flipped, and even the “on deck” piece can be flipped. Basically, this means you have a lot more control over the matches that you’re trying to make. It also means that with a bit of creativity you can actually set up chains (one match triggering another match), and you can also set up the ultimate achievement – clearing the screen. Both of these situations net you extra points, and it’s within your grasp if you can think the situation out quickly enough. Just remember that the pieces are constantly on a downward march, so if you leave things or play around with them too long, you won’t have time to react before a crisis strikes.

The game has three modes of play – endless, score attack and drop attack. While I’m not normally an “endless mode” kind of guy, that’s actually my favorite mode in 180. The nice thing is that even though it’s endless there are actually levels, so you still feel like you’re accomplishing milestones as you go along. Score attack gives you 90 seconds to get as many points as you can. It would have been nice to have a few different selections for the amount of time you could play this mode on, but 90 seconds is a pretty good allocation. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the point of drop attack is, though I suppose the distance markers on the right side of the screen should give me some indication. The game is OpenFeint enabled, and unlike a lot of games, the achievements the developer has lined up for you aren’t for the feint of heart (sorry for the pun).

Star Cheers You On

The graphics are simple but very pleasing to the eye. The different objects remind me of fossilized versions of marshmallows from Lucky Charms. You have a choice of 4 cute characters to choose from, and each one will sit down in the lower left corner and cheer you on when you are doing well. Of course, they’ll also be devastated when you finally lose. There really aren’t a lot of special effects except for when the objects disappear after a match, but that’s a pretty decent visual. The only thing I didn’t really care for was the dialog at the end showing your final statistics. Normally I’m not for standard user interface elements thrown into a game, but I think a regular iPhone dialog might have looked better than the half-screen presentation that currently exists. Or, maybe the stats screen just needs to go full screen.

The sound effects are decent, and amazing don’t get annoying even though they are comprised mainly of the noise made when an object disappears. It would have been nice if the little avatars made some sounds, but I guess they’ll just continue to cheer us on in silence. The music is nice and relaxing. We just need a couple more tracks. One for each game type would be cool. Personally, I think the 90 second attack mode should have a wild, energetic track to it.

While the combination match 3 / something else genre has taken off in the App Store, more traditional match 3 fare has begun to stagnate in recent months. Thankfully developers like Headcase Games are coming along and realizing that this is a genre that doesn’t need to go away – it just needs to be rejuvenated. 180 is a great start for that cause. The game is quite fun, the ability to flip pieces gives you more control then you’ve probably ever had in a match 3 game before, and the little avatars give the game some personality without interfering with game play. Overall 180 is a nicely polished game that deserves some limelight that it sadly probably won’t get. How about you give it some love?

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

Spinning Blades

Hand Of Greed is about collecting treasure and proving you can be the best thief around.  You’ll travel through a series of rooms filled with treasures and traps, and all you have to do is tap the treasures in order to grab them.  Problem is, if you happen to accidentally tap a trap at the same time you lose some health.  When all your health is depleted you’ve failed the room and have to start over.  If you can grab all the treasure with some health left then you’ve beaten the room, but to truly master the room you must beat it without getting hit even once.  There is also a timer, and if the timer runs out you lose some health as well.  Don’t start to relax once you’ve collected all the treasure, either – each room has several waves of treasure before it is complete.

Treasures come in different varieties, but the more of one type of treasure you collect in a row, the bigger a bonus you’ll get.  There are also red rubies that will replenish some of your health.  Finally, you get bonuses for extra time, so while you don’t want to go so fast that you keep making mistakes, you’ll don’t want to dawdle either.  Also, if you’ve beaten but not mastered a level, keep trying.  Even if you don’t master the level for a while, you can still earn higher scores.  Of course if you’re like me, once you’ve beaten a level there’s nothing left but mastery.  The thing that gets me the most about the game play is that when you really get into the game you start acting like you’re really going to get cut if one of the blades hits you.  I often find myself just about ready to touch the screen and then suddenly jerking back when a blade’s about to strike.  Just make sure you don’t start sucking your finger to stop the blood flow!

Hand Of Greed looks really nice.  The blades look cool, and the gems have a nice “turn to dust” effect when you tap them.  The screen goes red for a second when you get “cut” with a blade, which is always a nice touch.  I just wish there was more variety to the background.  Maybe they could change up the textures every couple of levels or so.  The sound effects are decent.  The blades extracting at the beginning of each level sounds good, as does the noise when you’re getting cut.  The music, on the other hand, really blows me away.  I’d say it’s overkill for this type of game, which in a way I think it is, but it definitely builds a tense, adventurous atmosphere.  It’s the type of soundtrack that you can sit and listen to even when you’re not playing the game and kind of forget that it’s actually game music.

Hand Of Greed is simple, intense and loads of fun. Be prepared to make several attempts at some of the levels before beating them, and then gear yourself up for a whole lot more tries at mastering many of the levels.  You’ll get so caught up in dodging blades and collecting treasure you won’t even notice the time fly by.  And even though you’ll be concentrating on not getting your fingers sliced off, try to pay attention to the music every once in a while.  You’ll be really glad that you did.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

There’s no question that the concept is accessible, and in fact it’s actually quite cool.  The screen is split in half (though this is conceptual, as there is no line down the center of the screen), and on each half of the screen is a numbered set of balloons.  The object of the game is to clear away the balloons by pressing the same numbered balloon on each side of the screen.

Just Starting

In normal mode you have levels, each of which is comprised of a series of 10 waves.  As you progress through the levels you’ll get more balloons per wave and the balloons will be more mixed up as to how they are placed on the screen.  There is a timer that perpetually decreases, and it decreases even faster when you make an incorrect mach.  However, it will go up slightly every time you make a correct match.  When the timer completely depletes the game is over.  You must complete a level with a certain minimum score in order to earn at least one star, and all levels in a group must be completed with at least one star to unlock the next group of levels.  In Endless mode you just get wave after wave of balloons.  Every so many waves more balloons will be added, and just like in Normal mode the order gets crazier with each passing wave.

The control is quite simple.  You just tap the two balloons you want to pop.  There are a couple of problems with how this works, though.  First of all, timing can be a real issue.  Even if you have your fingers over the right two balloons, if the timing with which you tap them isn’t just right you’ll fail.  The other issue is that because you’re fingers are in constant motion all over the screen and the game requires two hands to play, it can be difficult finding a way to hold the device that’s both comfortable and allows you enough flexibility of movement to do well in the game.  The result is a lot of frustrating moments where you think you’ve hit the right thing only to get the gut wrenching noise of failure.  The funny thing is that on most games this would be enough to make me want to give up, but with Tap Tap Balloons I feel oddly compelled to keep playing until I beat a level.

Visually the game is simple but nice.  There is no background to avoid any distractions, so you basically have the balloons and the timer in the upper left corner.  The balloons look cool, and the one that need to be tapped next will pulse a bit to let you know they’re ready to be tapped.  The effect when correctly tapped balloons fade away is decent as well.  I also like how the timer bar kind of dances a bit when time is running low.  Of course, that might be as much of a distraction as having backgrounds would be!

Starting To Go Mad!

The sound of tapping balloons correctly actually gets a bit old after a while, but then your only other option is the boing of an incorrectly selected option, so I guess I’ll stick with the “good” noise.  The music when things are going great is nice and peaceful and really quite relaxing.  Once the timer gets into the danger level, however, the music turns into this 80s ghetto adventure movie track that’s actually a bit of a hindrance.  When that music starts playing it makes me kind of nervous, and I find myself making a lot more mistakes.  It’s something akin to the annoying Final Jeopardy theme.

This is the rough part of the review.  Here’s where I’m supposed to say “everyone go out and buy this”.  The truth is, I really like the game, despite my frustrations with the controls.  Thankfully it requires two hands, though, so I can’t pull out my hair while I’m playing!  I guess the problem is that I’m not really sure what the target audience for this game is.  It acts like a casual game, but I think casual gamers will get frustrated quickly with the less than desirable controls.  Hard core gamers, on the other hand, will most likely find the concept too simple, and they might get frustrated with the controls.  As such, I’m going to have to give the game a cautionary rating.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

Sudoku 2

Easy Can Be Difficult 2

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Sudoku is Sudoku.  If you change the rules you might create a fun variation on the game, but then it’s really not Sudoku any more.  As a result, in the mobile world it’s really all about the interface and aesthetics – or so it would seem.  Sudoku 2 is actually fairly standard in that regards, if not maybe slightly above average.  You tap on a square in the grid to select it then you tap on a number at the bottom of the screen.  If you’re in “solve” mode the game will place the number in the square as an answer – if you’re right the number will stay and you’ll get points, but if you’re wrong you’ll have a mark against you.  When you get three marks you can still solve the board, but your current run will be broken.  If the game is in “notes” mode, the number will be recorded as another notation on the selected square.

There are three difficulty levels, and so far I have not been able to unlock anything above Easy.  Fair warning – if you’re just an average Sudoku player (or you’ve never played before) you might find the Easy level even a bit intimidating.  The next update is supposed to make the easy level a bit easier, which I’m looking forward to.  What sets Sudoku 2 apart from other Sudoku games is scoring.  Each game starts with a multiplier that slowly decreases as time goes on.  Whenever you successfully place a tile your score increases by the product of the number you’ve placed and the current multiplier.  If you complete a row, column or block, your score also increases by the product of the sum of the completed area and the multiplier.  More simply put, your score will increase by 45 times the multiplier (a row, column or block always adds up to 45).  There are also runs, which is the count of puzzles solved with less than 3 errors.  Scores and runs are kept track of on leader boards in OpenFeint if you have an account.

The game looks nice.  The tiles are easy to read, and there’s a second skin coming with the first update.  There are a few nice effects, like sparkles on the tiles in the bottom row and some spinning and twisting when you make a complete row, column or block.  It’s nothing overly special effecty, but it looks quite polished.  The sound effects are decent enough, and should be easily recognizable for fans of Guess The News.  Unfortunately, there are no sound effects.

Sudoku 2 is a nice alternative to the growing collection of Sudoku interfaces for the iPhone.  It’s especially good for the scoring, which sets it apart from other variations on the theme.  However, if you’re easily intimidated by games where the Easy level can even be difficult, you might want to investigate other version of Sudoku instead.  Hopefully the first update will satisfactorily address this issue.  For those of you that like a challenge, this might be a good version to try.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
App Store Link

Spin Puzzle

Some Random Anime Girl

This is a really simple game conceptually.  You get a picture that’s divided into 24 squares, and the squares are mixed up.  All you have to do is put them back in the right order.  You drag a piece to where you think it should go, and the piece that’s already occupying that spot will move to where the one you’re dragging was sitting.  If you tap on a piece it just rotates 90 degrees.  When you first select a picture you get to set it complete for a couple of seconds, except for a somewhat annoying countdown sign that’s plastered right in the middle of the picture.  If you don’t touch the screen for a couple of seconds a toolbar will pop up, and you can get a quick glimpse of the full image again, or quit the current image if you like.

Once all the pieces are in the right place you’ve beaten that picture, though you can play the picture again to try and finish it in less time.  The pieces are scrambled differently each time, though, so keep that in mind when playing through a picture more than once.  The pictures are grouped into bunches of five, and you must complete all the pictures in one group to move on to the next.  You can play pictures in the same group in any order, however.  There are achievements you can earn, though the game isn’t hooked into any social network.  So far I’ve only one an achievement for completing five puzzles, so I’m not sure if there are any to earn beyond completing groups of puzzles or not.

The graphics are really nice.  The characters have an anime quality about them, and are nicely detailed.  And of course they are drawn in such a way that it can sometimes be confusing at first what goes where.  That’s the nature of this type of game, however.  I will say that it would have been nice if the visuals were more generically fantasy themed, instead of just focused on female type characters.  A dragon or two never hurts anything, right?  Sound effects are non-existent, which is a shame.  A nice creaky stone sound when turning the tiles would have been cool, as well as some sort of chime once the puzzle was complete.  More importantly, though, is that this game needs music.  There’s no real action taking place, and it’s painfully obvious that the game is way too quiet.

This is actually a pretty fun game.  However, there are only 25 puzzles, and personally I couldn’t see sitting through each of them more than once, so it’s a bit short.  Plus, it’s extremely lacking in atmosphere.  Oddly enough, though, each time I complete a puzzle I’m strangely drawn towards trying the next one.  If you’re into jigsaw or sliding tile type puzzle games, this might be worth your while to try.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
App Store Link

Mondrian

That's A Painting?

This is a puzzle game that focuses on the latter works of the famous artist Piet Mondrian.  If you’re familiar with him other than by name you’re a better person than I, but thankfully it’s not really important to the game.  What you do need to know is that Piet acts as your spirit guide as you tour the world searching for his final paintings.  When you find the paintings you must unscramble them to make them look like they are supposed to.  As you go to the different locations and unscramble the paintings you’ll get all kinds of “useful” whit and wisdom from Piet himself.  That is one thing that makes this game so much fun.

So how do you unscramble the paintings?  Well it turns out that the paint is wet and slippery, and you can slide blocks of it around the canvas until the blocks hit either the edge of the canvas or another block of paint.  To slide a block of paint you simply swipe it in the direction you want it to move.  You have a certain number of moves you have to solve each painting in, but the fewer moves you use, the more money you earn.  You don’t need it for anything, but the money acts as your score.  There is a minimum number of moves in order to completing the painting, and if you beat the painting with higher than that number Piet will mark the painting for you so you can go back later to try and better your score if you want.  Once you fix all the paintings in one location another will be unlocked for you, though if you really feel the urge you can unlock a location simply by tapping on it.  I guess this is a failsafe for people like me who aren’t so good at these games.

The graphics of the locations are nicely detailed, though you don’t really get to see them for that long.  The drawings of Mondrain look good as well.  I have no idea if it’s what he really looks like, but they still look good.  I also like how the map looks like a big Mondrian painting.  Much like Mondrian’s paintings, the sound effects are pretty bare bones.  The paint makes a sound when you swipe it, and there is a nice little jingle when you solve a puzzle.  Unfortunately, there is no music to fill the mostly void audio portion of the game.

Mondrian starts off pretty simple, but as you progress to different locations the puzzles become quite challenging.  This probably won’t be your type of game if you don’t like to attempt a puzzle multiple times before finally solving it.  It also often requires you to think outside the box, despite its boxy appearance.  It’s definitely different than most puzzle game offerings on the iPhone, and well worth your while if you’re a patient person.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link

So that’s what’s up in the world of puzzle games on my iPod Touch this week.  For those keeping track, this wasn’t the themed issue I talked about at the end of Saturday Specials last week.  Let’s just say that next week’s episode will have a whole lot of choppin’ going on…

[All About Quick Looks]

Basically, you start at point A and must get to point B.  You use the accelerometer to move the ball left and right, and physics handles everything else.  The more you tilt the faster you go, which helps you jump over things.  If you need to fall of a cliff, just roll to the edge.  Sometimes there are teleports that will take you to other parts of the level, and at other times there are cannons that will fire you off to new locations.  The cannons are affected by your tilting just like the ball is.  Along the way you’ll encounter stars, and you can pick them up for extra points.  Your ranking on a level is based on stars collected and the amount of time it takes you to pass a level (I think number of tries might be included in there as well).

Beware The Bounce

On certain levels you’ll get different types of balls, which greatly affect game play.  For instance, the rubber ball can be hard to keep under control if it starts bouncing off the walls (literally), and the stone ball breaks if it falls too far or collides with something at too fast a speed.  The differences in the way the balls behave makes the game even more interesting, but it can make certain levels induce some hair pulling moments.  Thankfully, even though each subsequent level is locked until you complete the current one, you can actually choose to skip a level and complete it later if the level is too troublesome for you.  I’ve had to take advantage of that offer once so far.

The game has three modes that you can play.  Conquest allows you to go sequentially through all the levels.  This is a good place for most people to start.  Challenge mode is interesting because the game randomly picks 5 levels, and you must beat all the levels to win.  Some levels you just have to complete, while others require you to complete them under a certain amount of time.  For timed levels picking up a star will add 2 seconds to your time.  Finally there’s random mode, where the game just picks a level at random for you to play.  I think this one would have been a bit more fun if the game would have asked if you wanted to continue after each level instead of just dumping back to the main menu.  It would have been the same number of taps (1), but the flow would have been better in my opinion.

The graphics are okay.  Menu and interface elements, such as the speed meter and mini map, actually look really polished.  Even some of the special effects, like the ball kicking up dust when it lands or the particles when the ball disperses after hitting something, don’t look too bad.  The background textures are decent at times as well.  Unfortunately, the balls look like small, bland 3D renderings, and much of the level graphics look like simple wide line brushes or carved out spheres from paint.  There’s just a really inconsistency to the level of quality in the visuals.

Level Of Fours

Sound effects are pretty decent, especially when it comes to the noises the ball makes when rolling or tapping against something.  I also like the sound of the acid bubbling.  The music is all right, but it seems like the only play the first few bars of the track when you’re actually on a level.  The music played during the menu seems much more extensive.

Equilibrio is a nice change of pace from most ball rolling games.  The puzzles are challenging but for the most part surmountable without too much stress.  There are 60 levels, three different game play modes, and several prizes to earn that should keep you busy for quite some time.  This game existed before the rise of the social network, otherwise it seems like it would be a perfect candidate for OpenFeint.  While the audio and visual elements aren’t nearly as nice as many other games in this category, the game play more than makes up for it.  This is a bit of an older game, but if you haven’t tried it yet, and especially if you like this style of game, I highly recommend giving Equilibrio a try.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

Basically, you have to navigate a ship through several deviously routed tunnel systems without hitting or getting hit by anything.  You have a maximum amount of time you can spend on each level, and if you can make it within that time you’ll earn at least one star.  You can get two or three stars if you’re even quicker about it.  So far I think I’ve gotten more than one star only once.  Along the way you’ll pick up shields to temporarily dampen a blow, you’ll hit accelerator pads that give you a temporary boost of speed, and you’ll run into bombs that blow up inopportune doors.  On the down side, you have to stay away from the walls.  Also, on some levels missiles will try and take you down.

Avoid Lurking Dangers...

To control the ship you have an accelerate button and two buttons for rotating the craft left and right.  To slow down you just let go of the accelerate button.  There is no stop.  Personally, I’m a little too fidgety to be very good at this game.  Anyway, there’s a mini-map in the upper right corner so you know where to go, and if you’ve played the level at least once there will be a ghost image of your ship showing you what you did in the last run through.  You start a level with three lives, and each time you hit something or get hit by something when you don’t have a shield you lose a life.  You are then invulnerable for a second or two.  If you lose all of your lives or you don’t beat the highest allotted time for the level, you have to retry it.  You can only move on to the next level once you’ve beaten the current level at least once, though you’re always welcome to revisit a level to try and earn a better score.  Oddly, this is the first game of theirs with this formula where I don’t feel compelled to play a level again once I’ve beaten it.

The graphics sort of make me feel like I’m playing a Donut Games game, but even they aren’t up to the usual standards.  The space ship looks kind of cool and the flame trail isn’t bad.  Even the background is okay (though I’m always a sucker for deep space star planet type images), but there’s this Flintstones feeling of repetitiveness as you see the same couple of planets over and over.  The sound effects aren’t bad, except for the sound of your ship, which actually gets a bit annoying after a while.  And where’s the music?  That’s one of the things I’ve come to love the most about Donut Games products.

If you like the whole “dodge the cave walls” style of game play, you might get a kick out of this.  For me it’s not that interesting of a game play mechanic, and I was hoping that Donut Games would do their usual job of sprucing up a ho-hum concept.  Sadly, they really didn’t.  With all the other wonderful offerings Donut Games has, I really have a hard time recommending this one.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

Dragon’s Lair

Dragon’s Lair.  Since its release in 1983 and subsequent port to many different home systems, I think I’ve owned the game for at least 3 different systems.  Amazingly, I never get tired of playing through the game.  For those who may not actually be familiar with this piece of video game history, you play the unwitting hero Dirk The Daring, who must rescue the fair Princess Daphne from the clutches of the evil dragon Singe.  The game plays out through a series of traditional hand animated sequences, and at key moments you must direct the action simply by pressing one of 5 buttons – up, down, left, right and sword.  If you press the wrong button, or press the button at the wrong time, chaos ensues and you’re treated to an often humorous death scene.  If you prevail you move on to the next scene.

Most people find this lack of true control frustrating, but I find it unique and different.  It’s like you’re the director of a Saturday morning cartoon, and that’s a feeling you can’t even quite capture with cell shading in a 3D environment (though Dragon’s Lair 3D did quite a remarkable job).  There are Arcade and Home versions included with the iPhone incarnation of the game, and personally I prefer the Home version.  Home follows a more traditional route where dying just puts you back at the beginning of the current section of the game you were in, whereas the arcade version, which I believe has less scenes, compensates by randomly placing you somewhere when you die.  In the Arcade version you really have no idea how far along in the game you are.  In both versions I was disappointed to see that they took out the concept of lives, as it makes the game a lot easier to beat.

Wacked In The Head, Yeah, Yeah

After more than 25 years this is still one of the best looking games in existence.  3D is cool, there’s no doubt about it, but there’s a certain magic when it comes to fine traditional animation that no computer can top.  The characters are so well designed, and Dirk’s facial expressions make him one of the greatest bumbling heroes in the gaming world.  The only real negative to the way the game is constructed is that the way the death scenes are interjected looks tacky, and often they seem like they have been cut off before they can finish.  The sound effects only enhance the majesty of the cartoon world.  It would be interesting to hear Dirk speak, but his silence other than grunts, groans and shrieks actually makes the character more whimsical.  There is some outstanding music that plays during the menu, but I’m guess that’s an “after the fact” thing because the game itself is silent in that regards.  Interestingly, I never really noticed that before.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m rather fond of this game.  Even after having played it to death on a couple of other systems, it’s still one of the best iPhone games I’ve played recently.  It’s certainly not for everyone due to its limited control scheme, but if you’re a fan, you’re nostalgic, or you’re open to new gaming experiences, you really should give this one a try.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link

Pet Shop Girl

I don’t normally review lite versions of games, but I liked this one enough (and didn’t realize it was a lite version when I downloaded it), that I decided to talk about it briefly anyway.  The premise is that you decide you want to open a pet shop, and you borrow the capital to buy the shop from your uncle, who happens to be a pirate.  You either have to earn enough money to pay your uncle back the booty you borrowed from him, or you’ll be doomed to sail with him for the rest of your life.  What I like about this game is that it’s a combination of match 3 and time management, which I’ve seen in other match 3 games before to an extent, but I think Pet Shop Girl takes it to the next level.

Crabs, Horses and Koalas, Oh My!

As customers come into the store they will request an animal that they want to buy.  You must match three or more of that animal to make a sale.  As long as the animals are touching, they don’t have to be in a straight line (though no diagonals are allowed).  If you match more than 3 you can actually make additional money on the sale.  Upgrades allow you to get pets that make more money and “power ups” that do things like raise the happiness level of clients or make an automatic sale when it comes down to the wire.  You can also make matches outside of sales that will fill up stars, and you can use stars to unlock additional locations for buying pets and power ups.  You only get 11 days with the free version, but you can upgrade to unlimited days for $1.99 or unlimited plus a bonus unlockable location for $2.99.

The graphics are cute, but what do you expect from a game with a playing board full of fuzzy little pets?  The character drawings are pretty good too, though the patrons don’t quite have the personalities you’d expect from time management clients.  Sound effects are okay, but again lacking a bit in personality. I am impressed with the music.  Certainly not the best an iPhone game has to offer, but there are at least two or three different tunes that get swapped around during game play, and that’s pretty unusual for this type of game.

Overall, Pet Shop Girl is a nice mix of time management and match 3.  I haven’t taken the plunge yet to purchase the full version, but I think I will pretty soon.  I’ve played through the 11 level demo twice now and it was just as fun the second time around.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link

Hoggy

One of my biggest complaints about the gaming scene on the iPhone is that there aren’t enough platform games.  This one has actually been around for a while, and I’ve finally gotten around to playing it.  I should have checked it out a lot sooner.  You play Hoggy, a purple blob whose girlfriend has been captured.  To rescue her you must conquer worlds contained within 45 jars scattered around the main catacomb of rooms.  The caveat is that Hoggy eschews the traditional “run and jump” mechanism of most platformers.  Instead, while you can move Hoggy left and right, the only way to move up and down is to change Hoggy’s direction of gravity!  Tapping the screen will cause him to flip his position up or down.

To collect the key in a given world you must eat all the fruit in that level.  There will be plenty of critters around to try and stop you.  Touching any of them will cause you to die and restart the level, unless you are in block mode.  There are times where you’ll have to use creatures to solve puzzles, though.  There are also items that will transform you into a brick, which will help you break through certain barriers.  And there are plenty of other elements to help you solve puzzles as well.  The nice thing is that while challenging, most of the worlds are pretty short, so it’s not too much of a burden having to play them several times before beating them.

Make The Platforms Disappear

The graphics have a definite Super Mario Bros. feel about them.  The main character is really cute, especially when he’s chomping down on fruit or sweating it because he’s too close to the edge of a cliff (not that he can fall off or anything).  The characters as a whole are well animated.  My favorite animation, though, is when Hoggy gets hit by a critter and splats into the screen.  The sound effects are pretty cutsie as well, but it all works together to provide a fun atmosphere.  The music has a NES / SNES quality to it, and is quite enjoyable.

Hoggy is a fun little platform game, where every level is a puzzle to solve.  I love that they’ve done something other than the standard jump and run mechanics, and the graphics and sound are light hearted and amusing.  For seasoned veterans the game might be a bit simple, but it should provide a sufficient amount of challenge for the average player.  It’s definitely been worth my while.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link

Next week might actually have a theme – it all depends.  I’m still waiting for one of the games that’s supposed to go into the article, so if I don’t get it in time I’ll have to come up with something else.  Doesn’t the mystery just give you chills?

Apparently ninja hate fruit, or so Halfbrick Games would have you believe.  And not just certain ninjas, mind you.  All ninjas hate fruit.  As such, you’ve taken it upon yourself as a ninja to slash as many fruit as you can.  The trick is that you can only slash them while they’re in your little window of visibility, so you need to make sure you get them before they fall back off the screen.  You start with three “lives”, and each time an uncut fruit falls out of site you lose a life.  At 100 points you get a life back, but I haven’t made it to 200 yet to see if this additional life comes at every 100 points or not.  I hope so, because if I ever make it to 200 I’m sure I’ll need the extra life.  Note that you can’t have any more than 3 lives at a time.

Stunning Splatter

To slash a fruit you just drag your finger over it in – you guessed it – a slashing motion.  If you can slash multiple fruit at once that’s great, because it clears them out more quickly.  Unfortunately you don’t get any extra points for that.  In addition to the fruit there are bombs.  Bombs are bad.  If you accidentally slice a bomb your game is over, no matter how many lives you have left.  I suggest you stay away from them.  The game is OpenFeint enabled, and there are currently 16 achievements you can earn.  There’s also a global leader board, which right now I’m not even close to being at the top of.  Give me time, though, and I might make my way half way up the ladder or so.

Now do you see why I don’t understand the addiction?  It’s not that what’s there isn’t fun, it’s just that there’s not a whole lot there.  Here are a couple of suggestions to bolster game play.  First off, we need some power ups and some more bad things.  Diversity is your friend.  Second, an “extreme points” mode where you can get more points for multiple fruit slashed at once would be great.  Of course, this would require a separate leader board, because you don’t want to mix the two types of scores.  Finally, a mode where you can throw some fruit up and slash it to make “art” that you could save and email to friends would be pointless but nifty.

Visually, this is a game that Gallagher would approve of.  The background is a nicely detailed wooden wall, and as you slice the well rendered 3D fruit they splash against said wall.  Sadly the stains fade away – it would be nice if there were an option to not have the game clean up after itself.  Still, for the moments the splatters are there it looks really cool.  The only thing missing is a mode where you tap the fruit and a mallet comes out to hit them.  Anyway, I also like the effect when you accidentally slice a bomb, though I really hope I don’t see that very often.

Beautiful Fruit

The sound effects are good, but I do wish the different fruit sounded a bit different when being sliced.  The only one that seems vary greatly is the banana, which doesn’t make much noise at all.  The background is actually the best part of the audio, with chirping birds and a light rainfall.  If it weren’t for the fact that I can see the iPod I might think I was outdoors!  The only thing missing is some cool oriental music playing in the background.  It could be soft, naturally, so that it doesn’t overpower the rain, but it should be there.

Well, there you have it.  The short and sordid story of deadly assassins and their disdain for nature’s snack foods.  If you’ve been hesitant like I was to try this game, don’t hesitate any longer.  It’s already a blast, and if the developers add to it I’m sure it will only get better.  It’s time you showed us what your ninja fruit slicing skills were made of.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

AppRoach

This falls under a category of game I like to call “Why?”  Basically you have some sort of food in the middle of the screen, and a whole host of roaches are swarming towards it.  Your job is to squish as many as you can before they’ve completely consumed the food.  As you kill the roaches your weapon meter fills up, and depending on it’s level you have access to either a fly swatter, some bug spray or a bug bomb.  The fly swatter kills one or two roaches that happen to be underneath it, the bug spray kills anything you drag you finger over for a second or two, and I think the bug bomb kills everything that’s on the screen at the time you use it.  Of course, you can always just tap on a roach to kill it, but bigger roaches take more taps to kill.  In the end you won’t get through too many big bugs unless you can keep your weapon meter filled up so that you can bug bomb or spray the big ones.

That's A Tasty Sandwich

The graphics are pretty decent, with nicely detailed food and lively roaches.  This begs the question, however, of why you’d want to see anything remotely resembling real roaches devouring leftovers.  I’m not saying I’m afraid of roaches, but they do kind of give me the willies.  The sound effects are okay, and at least the bugs themselves don’t make a lot of clicking noises.  Now THAT would be creepy.  The music is actually kind of nice, and it’s a bit upbeat and lighthearted, which almost seems counter to the general atmosphere of the game.

If you’re into bug smashing games, then there’s probably nothing wrong with this one, though I must say of the two or three that I’ve tried this probably has the least to offer in terms of options.  Personally, I just don’t get what the appeal is in this particular sub-genre of “tap to destroy” games.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
App Store Link

BALLance

Other than a slightly clever play on words in the name that Microsoft Word really wants to autocorrect, BALLance doesn’t really have a whole lot going for it.  The object of the game is to get a ball from one side of the screen to the other.  There are only four levels, and honestly I didn’t even have the patience to get through level 3.  You move the ball using the accelerometer, which is touchy at best, and there is no way to calibrate it within the game.  There are yellow marks along the way that you need to stop on to earn points.  Then there are red marks and gaps that you must jump over, because hitting the red marks or falling in the gaps will cause you to start the level over.  Unfortunately, the jump button works maybe once every 20 or 30 tries.  To top it all off, the levels are timed.  Oh, and on level 3, there’s a red mark right at the start of the level.  Good luck with that.  Finally, for instructions you need to read the iTunes description, because there aren’t any in the game itself.

Peaks And Valleys

The graphics are quite basic.  The landscape is a green blocky structure, with occasional blue to indicate rivers.  Then, of course, there are the yellow and red strips, and your ball, which is a nice shade of blue.  The simplistic graphics would be fine if there were a decent game behind it, but since the game isn’t any fun it would be nice to have something to look at.  Sounds are minimal, mainly consisting of a noise when you hit the red strips.  There is no music.

There are plenty of puzzles out there, even when it comes to ball rolling platform type games.  As such, there’s no way I could recommend a game with poor controls, basic aesthetics and only four levels.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
App Store Link

Come back next week when I’ll (maybe) be reviewing two more titles that I come across during the week.  As always, thanks for reading and don’t say I didn’t warn you!

If you care about the plot, Homer accidentally momentarily consumes a donut containing a microchip that will do evil things for Mr. Burns.  When the donut gets knocked out of him he decides that this donut is too important for him to let it get away, and thus your quest begins.  This is true Simpsons storytelling if I ever saw it.  The game itself plays quite like the original Simpsons Arcade, or if you’re actually not familiar with that game think Double Dragon or Streets Of Rage.  If those don’t mean anything to you it’s time to hit Wikipedia.

How It All Began

Anyway, the various locals of Springfield are laid out in a side scrolling manner, and you control Homer as he travels these memorable locales taking out one bad guy after another.  You move Homer with a virtual joystick, and punch and jump with two buttons on the right side of the screen.  Depending on proximity you’ll punch, kick, head butt, or even grab and toss your enemies, all with one action button.  If you jump and then attack Homer will do a belly flop and take out all nearby enemies.  The controls work surprisingly well for being virtual, though this game suffers just like most of it’s kind in terms of depth control – you can move “in and out” of the screen as well as left and right, and often it’s hard to tell if you’re lined up exactly with the bad guys you want to attack or not.

In addition to all of your standard attacks you can break boxes to reveal power ups.  Bart will temporarily ride on your back and slingshot anyone that gets too close.  Lisa does a power jump rope move that takes down anyone on the screen, and Marge sweeps in with Maggie to bop you on the head and send you into a temporary “whirlwind” mode where you can hit the bad guys but they can’t touch you.  There are also certain items like Mailboxes and trash cans that you can pick up to toss at people.  You can even gather a wide array of weapons from a huge wooden mallet (ala Itchy and Scratchy) to a taser (probably my favorite weapon in the bunch).  All the weapons are temporary and will fade away more quickly if they get knocked out of your hands.

The part that’s kind of disappointing is the “array” of villains.  Except for the boss guys, which are true Springfield inhabitants and actually kind of interesting, you’re basically fighting Simpson-ized versions of characters out of the Matrix.  At least it would have been nice to have a wider array of villain types.  In between levels you can play mini-games to try and earn extra continues.  And, should you happen to lose a life while fighting the bad guys, you get the pleasure of swiping the screen to slap Homer across the face to revive him.  The “3 Stooges” fan in me loves that part.

Bart's Locked And Loaded

The graphics are all Simpsons.  The characters are perfectly rendered, the animation is well done, and the backgrounds make you feel right at home (if you’re a Simpsons fan, that is).  I especially get a kick out of watching Homer dance as he successfully completes each level.  Even the health restores are perfectly suited to the atmosphere, whether a donut for a small boost or a sub sandwich to restore the full health bar.  The sound effects are also vintage Simpsons.  It would have been nice to hear the voices, but otherwise well done.  The music, on the other hand, is a bit disappointing.  The video game version of the opening theme is great, but everything else sounds more like generic action game music than something reflective of the zany antics of the Simpsons.

For those who need all the fancy 10 button, 300 move action heroes that “modern” games have to offer, you might not find enough about the more simplistic nature of The Simpsons Arcade to enjoy.  If you remember what all the great side scrolling slug fests of yesteryear were like, or if you’re content with the likes of Zombieville USA and similar games, this should be right up your alley.  Should you happen to be a fan of the Simpsons and you haven’t already purchased this game, I’d question your loyalty.  There’s nothing real original here, but the game play is solid, the atmosphere is fun, and the audio and visual make you feel like you’re living the cartoon.  Just watch out for Homer’s drool…

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

The premise is simple.  The little birdie wants to get from one door to the other in each tree, and you must help him do so.  The path between the doors is filled with leaves, and each leaf must disappear (or be closed) before you can exit the tree.  With the exception of safe leaves which never close, you simply have to jump onto a leaf and then back off to close it.  Along the way you’ll encounter special leaves that have quite useful functions.  There are leaves that will cause you to single or double jump in the direction of the arrow above the leaf.  One type of leaf will close all the other leaves in the row with it (the exception being an “opener” leaf or a safe leaf), while it’s sister leaf opens all other leaves in the same row (including closer leaves).  A different variant of the closer leaf will close leaves that are diagonal to it.  Finally, ordered leaves must be closed in the order of the numbers hovering above them.

Oops, I Failed...

To make birdie jump you just tap above where you’d like him to jump.  You can jump diagonally, to the left and right, and down, but you can’t jump straight up.  You can a distance of either one or two leaves, depending on how you are jumping.  The game seems really responsive, so if birdie isn’t jumping it probably just means you haven’t clicked the right spot.  Keep in mind that you can jump to an empty spot, and it’s still treated like a leaf was there, so you really need to click slightly above the spot where the leaf was.  It’s really easy to get used to, though.  The game is OpenFeint enabled, and based on the achievements there are at least 60 levels, but sadly there are only 5 achievements to earn in the game.  Hopefully the developer will expound on that some day.

Visually Birdie In Trouble is nice.  The graphics are a bit on the tiny side, but everything is colorful and well drawn.  There’s not a lot of animation going on, but what’s there looks sharp.  I love the expressions on the bird’s face when it either falls due to a miscued jump or gets to the exit without having closed all of the leaves.  Of course, in the second instance you also feel bad for it because the expression is so sad and pitiful.  You’ll get over it quickly, though.

Getting More Complicated

The sound effects aren’t bad.  They actually sound like they came out of a cartoon, which suits the game well.  My favorite is the little scream that birdie emits as he plummets of the screen when jumping to a leafless spot.  The music is oddly mesmerizing.  I can’t quite put my finger on what’s so special about it, other than it sounds like it should be coming from a Super Nintendo game.  If you’re not a retro gamer or you’re not familiar with the system, that’s actually a compliment.

Birdie In Trouble is certainly a step (or jump, as it were) in the right direction for Klik Games.  While there was nothing wrong with Fastball, it was “just another” in the growing sea of tilt to guide rolling ball games.  Birdie In Trouble, on the other hand, is a refreshing little puzzle game that stands out amidst the crowd of match 3 clones and word games.  The best part is that despite the cute exterior, there are some really crafty puzzles to be solved.  If you’re a puzzle game fan looking for a challenge, I definitely suggest picking this one up.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[All About Quick Looks]

Zombie Smash

The first thing I like about Zombie Smash is that it takes the zombie game back to its Evil Dead story telling roots.  You must protect your house from an onslaught of zombie invaders, and even though you could probably just leave your house and outrun them, what would be the sport in that?  I also like the fact that while there are weapons and some shooting is involved on certain levels, this is not in fact a shooting game.  Rather, it is a “flick to defend” style game in the vein of Knights Onrush and Castle Frenzy.  The fact that it’s set in a zombie tale is a nice change of pace from most games of this style as well.  The game has three modes (campaign, endless siege and sandbox), so there’s plenty to keep you busy, and integration with the Crystal social network adds all the customary social networking benefits.

Campaign mode is a series of 31 days over which you must defend the house from wave after wave of merciless zombie hordes.  On certain days new zombie types and / or weapons will be revealed to you.  After day 7 you will unlock the ability to upgrade weapons, and after day 17 you unlock Endless Siege mode.  Sandbox mode is always available, but you can only use zombies that have been unlocked in Campaign mode.  To defend your house you flick the zombies in the air.  If you want to do more damage you can actually drag them up in the air and then back down to slam them into the ground.  You might need to repeat once or twice to fully kill a zombie.  When a zombie is dead they will release a star that you can collect to go towards upgrading weapons.  Also, some zombies will leave weapons which you can collect by tapping on them.  You can collect as many weapons as you have available slots on the left side of the screen.  To use a weapon, tap on its slot.

Look At Them Fly

So far I’ve run into 4 different types of zombies, and even though their ultimate goal is to take you out, they all have slightly different personalities.  Speed and stamina differ, but beyond that one of the zombie types carries a gun, and another can’t be flicked, which means you must use special weapons to destroy it.  At some point the game suggests that you get used to using your thumbs to do the flicking, and I concur with that if it’s at all comfortable for you.  It’s an especially useful talent when you have zombies coming at you from both sides of the house.  Also, don’t forget to use your special weapons.  You don’t get an unlimited number of them, but you can’t keep them between levels either.  Besides, there’s something slightly satisfying about dropping a giant brick or laying down land mines in front of the zombie hordes.  Now I know what it would have been like if they produced zombie cartoons under the Looney Tunes label!

The graphics in Zombie Smash are great.  The background looks like a still from a Saturday morning cartoon, and the zombies are well rendered in typical ragdoll fashion.  I’m not normally a fan of the whole ragdoll look / feel, but it actually works here.  I also love the fact that the final kill on each level is presented video-camera style and in slow motion (though I may be partial to this because on one final kill the zombie’s head rolled onto a mine and went shooting off the screen as the mine exploded).  The sound effects are nice because they aren’t your typical zombie grunts and groans – or at least not always.  The utterances are more human like, reminding you that these rotting abominations were once people just like you.  Of course, that doesn’t stop you from killing them, but I’m just saying…  The music is quite suitable for this game.  It certainly sounds like something you’d hear playing in the background of a classic b-movie zombie flick.

I think I’ve provided a decent cursory analysis of Zombie Smash, but the reality is that I haven’t detailed nearly all the goodness that’s encompassed in this game.  This is probably one of the best zombie games available in the App Store today, and that’s quite a lot of ground to be tops over.  If you haven’t checked this little gem out yet, I highly suggest you do so.  You won’t be disappointed.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link

More Zombies?

Generally speaking I’m a fan of Pocket Monkey Games.  Sparta: Lord Of War, Champion Archer, and Fling Sling were all really fun games.  Unfortunately, More Zombies? doesn’t follow that trend for me.  I do like the fact that it doesn’t feel just like all the other 2D zombie blasting games on the market, but in the end there just isn’t enough to keep me interested.  The game has you protecting one city block for as long as you can, and while the limited scope worked in Zombie Smash, it just seems too constrained here.  It doesn’t take too much of a clump of zombies to make it impossible to move anywhere, and even though there’s a “depth” to the game (you can move towards the back and front of the street as well as moving left to right), the zombies’ reach seems to have a depth as well, which doesn’t seem fair, since you can only shoot along the left / right plane.

Guard The Block

There’s an interesting selection of guns to be found in the game, but in the end the Uzi seems to be the only one worth using so far.  Thankfully they at least balance the pickups out so that I never seem to run out of ammo, so that’s good.  On the other hand, this truly is a survival shooter in the sense that you get one bar of heath, and there’s no chance to refill it at any point.  Once you’re dead you’re dead.  It would be nice if there were an easy option where you could score health pickups as well as gun and ammo pickups.  I’m also really disappointed in the lack of variety of bad guys.  There appear to only be three different types of zombies, and you get introduced to all of them within the first few seconds of the game.  The only differences between them seem to be how many hits they can take and their speed (though neither varies greatly from zombie to zombie).  Controlling the main character is a simple matter of a virtual joypad for walking and left and right buttons for shooting.  At the bottom of the screen is your active weapons slots, where you can have up to three weapons ready at any given time.  Just tap on the one you wish to use.

Graphically I was not very impressed with the game at all, especially when compared to the titles I mentioned earlier in this review.  There are certainly a lot of details, but everything feels more like design sketches the production level artwork.  I guess maybe if this were called “doodle zombies” that would be all right, but I was really looking forward to something more along the quality of Sparta or Champion Archer.  The sound effects are decent, though with only three different types of zombies the grunts and groans get repetitive real quickly.  At least you can tell a difference between each of them.  I do like the music, which is probably the bright spot of the aesthetics in this game.  Well, that and the tie your main character is wearing.  Don’t see that very often in a zombie survival game.

As a fan of Pocket Monkey Games and zombie games in general I really wanted to like More Zombies?  Unfortunately, I just could not get into it.  That being said, I applaud them for being different from the pack, and if you’re tired of the run of the mill side scrolling zombie shooter, it would still be worth your while to give this one a try.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
App Store Link

[All About Quick Looks]

All News Is Puzzle-Worthy

The game contains several categories such as international news, entertainment and odd stories.  At the beginning of the game you select a country, and news stories from certain categories will be appropriately tailored to that country.  You select your category, decide whether you want to play classic or timed, and then pick one of four difficulty levels.  You can jump right to the toughest level if you’d like, or you can start at easy and automatically work your way through by beating each level.  Within a level there will be several headlines to decipher.  The headline will be laid out with one or more of the first several words missing multiple letters.  Underneath the headline is a pool of letters, and you can either tap a letter or drag a letter to add it to the headline.  Tapping will insert the letter into the next available slot of the selected word, while when you drag a letter you can drop it in any available slot on the selected word.  To select a different word, just tap on the word you wish to work on.

The game sports both Classic and Timed modes.  In classic modes you have to get a certain percentage of the headline right to move on to the next one.  Your percentage will go down if you accidentally put a letter in the wrong slot.  Early on you’re afforded a few mistakes, but on the harder levels it doesn’t take much to bump you below the safety percentage.  In timed mode you of course have a timer to contend with.  Thankfully there are no tick tock noises or alarms flashing or anything like that (or at least none that I’ve noticed yet), though on the down side you may end up with less time than you think you have at any moment.  You lose seconds off the clock in timed mode when placing a letter in the wrong slot.  I’m not sure how or if your percentage can be less than 100% in timed mode.  But wait – there’s more.  As the levels get tougher, the active letter pool might apply to more than one word in the phrase.  And, to make things even more challenging, eventually vowels will be denoted by Vs in the phrase, meaning you could have whole words missing.  This is where my brain starts to melt down when playing this game – but it’s still fun.

I was quite impressed with Guess The News visually.  This is not meant as a dig on developers of word puzzle games, but generally the visuals tend to suffer for sake of game play.  That’s not really an issue, because a word game doesn’t need to look like Halo 3 to be fun.  However, Guess FingerArts Games apparently just likes to put icing on the cake, as GtN looks good.  The menu interface is top notch, and when you get into the game itself there are all kinds of nice touches.  The pieces will glimmer from time to time, and when you complete a word a ripple will permeate through the letters.  Everything just looks sharp and professional.  The sounds are also well done.  As I listen to them I can picture some guy sitting a table twirling his noisemakers, ringing that old bell that came off a bicycle, or strumming a few bars on a xylophone.  The music is pretty good too, but you only get to hear it during the menus.  That’s too bad, because I don’t really think it would be distracting while you’re actually playing.

I can’t say I was an instant fan of this game.  In fact, I struggled to play it long enough to effectively write this review.  Once I actually got into the game, however, I realized that there was a whole lot of fun to be had.  When you start getting whole words missing the game gets quite challenging, and the constantly updating puzzles is a big bonus.  To top it all off you can actually read the full news stories if you want.  I may not be a fan of current events, but at least now I know an entertaining way to read about them!

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
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[All About Quick Looks]

To start out the game you get to pick from one of four characters, assuming you’ve unlocked them.  You get one choice to begin with, and so far I haven’t figured out how to unlock any of the others, though I suspect it has to do with earning a certain number of points.  At any rate, once you’ve selected your character the mayhem begins.  Your objective is to dodge the creatures and collect the berries that keep popping up.  Creatures come in three varieties.  The basic critter just moves around and will hit you if you’re actually careless enough to run into it.  The aggressive critter will actually run after you if you get to close, but it will calm down when you put enough space between yourself and it.  The final creature pops in, drops a bomb on the playing field, and pops back out.  The bombs last for a couple of seconds and then detonate, or they detonate a couple seconds after being touched by a critter, I’m not sure which.  Either way, stay away when they blow.  On the plus side, critters get blown up by bombs too.

The Glade

The main berry you collect earns you a whopping one point.  The mushroom will earn you an extra life if you have less than three.  The last thing you can collect is weapons.  Once you’ve picked up a weapon you have 4 seconds to get as many critters as you can before the level is over.  Most weapons leave you impervious to being hit by critters, but a couple still allow attacks to come in.  Weapon types include a swinging ball and chain, lightening, a whirling vortex, and my favorite – a plug that when popped sucks all the critters into a drain.  Talk about your homage to Looney Toons!  Once a level is complete you’ll earn 10 points for each critter you destroyed with a weapon.  You can also earn a drifting bonus which can range from 0 to 100.  The more you stay away from the sides of the screen during the level, the bigger your drifting bonus is.  The game is OpenFeint enabled, so there are also achievements that you can earn that can in turn give you extra points as well.

Controlling your character is simply a matter of tilting the device where you’d like to move.  It actually works really well, and there’s always a calibration option if it’s not quite to your liking.  Weapons are automatically activated when you pick them up, so there’s no need to worry about that.  While not absolutely necessary since the current control scheme works pretty well, it would be nice if there were a touch option for those who just don’t want to use tilt for whatever reason.

As is pretty much standard for Pastel Games products, the graphics are quite interesting.  The background is basically a bunch of leaves.  The characters look good, but for the most part are not animated.  The aggressive critter gets animated when it starts to chase you, and the bomb character is animated when it drops a bomb.  Your character is only animated when it’s involved with a weapon.  The weapon effects are definitely pretty cool, however, and almost make up for the lack of animation in the rest of the game.  The sound is kind of the same way.  Your character laughs once in a while, and there’s a cool Jaws like riff when a bomb or aggressive critter pops onto the board, but most sound effects are reserved for the weapons.  The best noises are the frozen critters shattering and the whole sequence when your character “pulls the plug” (I love that weapon).  The music is nothing to get excited about, so I won’t.

Pastel Games started out kind of weak in their offerings, but with Toxic Jump and The Glade I think they’ve hit their stride.  Their games aren’t revolutionary, but rather solid implementations of tested genres that add a flair that is distinctly Pastel Games.  They have a unique visual style that’s always interesting.  As for The Glade, they managed to take a genre that’s been pretty overloaded lately and make it fresh again.  The concept of levels, a weapon with limited use to finish out the level, and the “drifting bonus” concept all add up to a “dodge ‘em all” experience not quite like anything you’ve experienced before.  This is definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re a fan of the genre.  It might even get you interested if you’re not yet a fan.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
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[All About Quick Looks]

Odyssey: Trail Of Tears / Odyssey: 2012

In the early 90s, when CD players were coming of age and developers realized they could use them to make bigger, badder (sometimes quite literally) gaming experiences, an unusual breed of adventure game surfaced – the FMV game.  FMV stands for “Full Motion Video”, and the idea was that the actual story sequences would be video clips, and every now and again you’d be presented with a set of options to help guide the story.  It was sort of like “choose your own adventure” with bad acting.  Here we are 15-20 years later, and we get to relive this phenomenon on our iPhones and iPod Touches thanks to a two part series entitled Odyssey: Trail Of Tears and Odyssey: 2012.  Unfortunately, I have much the same feelings towards the sub-genre now that I did back when it first debuted, and I once more recall why it basically faded away.

On the plus side, the camera work in these two games is not bad.  At times there are some nice shots of beautiful scenery such as a waterfall in 2012, and the driving sequences are actually more professional looking than a lot of the stuff you see in TVs or movies now.  The acting is okay, which I don’t fault anyone for.  I suspect the people in the videos are friends of the guy that put the games together.  There’s no background music, which I suppose adheres to the “realism” of the way the video was filmed.  It would have been nice for it to be a little more theatrical in this sense, but it’s no big loss.  The down side to the video is that there is no way to skip it in part one, which makes replay a drag.

Odyssey: Trail Of Tears

The interface is slightly better in 2012, but it’s really not user friendly in either game.  All you have to do is click on the option you’d like and click a button to “submit” that option, but the second tap seems totally unnecessary, and over the long haul that’s potentially a lot of extra taps.  If there were some way to cancel the initial selection of what I wanted to do I could see the “submit” being necessary, but as it stands right now it’s just silly.  To make maters worse in Trail Of Tears, you’re treated to a little animation every time you submit a choice that is supposed to represent your message traveling back in time.  It’s kind of interesting the first couple of times you make a choice, but after that it becomes unnecessary.

2012 is actually the prequel / sequel to Trail Of Tears, wherein you and your friend are camping on the day the world ends according to some interpretations of the Mayan calendar.  According to some radio broadcasts from France the world is headed into the toilet, and you need to figure out what’s going on.  Sadly, this takes all of about 5 minutes of game time and then an external Youtube video to figure out.  Personally, I would have preferred to see this all meshed together as a single Youtube video, and somewhere in the credits of Trail Of Tears say “for an intro to what this game is all about, go here” with a link to Youtube.  As a game, 2012 just doesn’t really work.

Odyssey: 2012

So now on to Trail Of Tears.  There’s definitely a lot more “game” to be played here, but in the end it doesn’t work out a whole lot better than 2012.  In this chapter you are a scientist from the future who guides an amateur adventurer from 2008 to try and solve a murder.  You would think this would actually be interesting, but the problem is that it really ends up being more of a geography / Native American history lesson than an actual game with an interesting story line.  That’s great if you’re into that sort of thing, but I’ve never been a fan of either subject, so for me it was very hard to enjoy the videos.  Plus, with all the talk about the terrain and such the game really loses focus on the whole murder plot, though I sometimes wonder if that was the actual intention.

In the end, the Odyssey series doesn’t have a whole lot going for it.  The story isn’t that interesting, the interface is more obstructive than practical, and the lack of ability to skip videos makes constant replay a drag (and there will be need to replay Trail Of Tears when you make a wrong choice).  I like the concept of FMV games, but I’m just not a fan of this particular series.

Final Verdict:
Odyssey: Trail Of Tears – Not Recommended
App Store Link
Odyssey: 2012 – Not Recommended
App Store Link

[All About Quick Looks]

Who's Feeling Small Now?

In Trap Master you play a retired army general who’s fallen out of favor and makes a drunken claim one day that he will recover a treasure hidden in the bowels of a dungeon guarded by many traps and a red dragon.  Seeking to make good on your claim you head into the dungeon to recover the treasure.  You’ll traipse through many heavily trapped levels, grabbing treasures and trying to avoid whatever traps are meant to crush the life out of you.  Each level has a certain number of traps you must avoid, which are counted down at the bottom of the screen.  A trap could consist of more than one object, however.  At the borders of the playing field arrows will flash to indicate where the traps are coming from.  In some cases traps will be objects that roll from one side of the screen to the other, and in other cases they will be things like lasers that will shoot across the screen.  It’s really important when you’re dealing with things like lasers that you quickly analyze all the arrows and how they might intersect, because there is no dodging a beam once it has been fired.

The game uses tile based movement, and on random tiles treasures will appear and disappear.  You need to grab these treasures for two reasons.  First of all, your points come from the treasures, rather than from merely surviving the traps.  Second, if you miss a certain number of treasures you’ll have to spend some time dodging the angry dragon, which will try and stomp you out with his really big foot.  During that time you won’t get any points, because no treasures spawn.  To move around the dungeon you have two choices: you can use a virtual d-pad (which can be placed on the left or right) or buttons that appear on the four edges of the screen.  I found the buttons along the edges too hard to use because they are far enough apart that quick reactions become difficult.  Unfortunately, while the d-pad is my preferred option, there were still times where it felt like it wasn’t being as responsive as it could be or it just plain went a different direction than what I had requested.  Still, the virtual d-pad works well overall.

Trap Master sports three different game play modes.  In Original you traverse the dungeon a level at a time, avoiding 25 traps per level.  As you progress through the levels there are more objects per trap and they move more quickly.  It also takes less missed treasures to stir the dragon up.  In Survival mode it appears that you are just trying to dodge the dragon’s foot as long as you can, collecting treasures along the way.  There’s also an Expert mode, but I haven’t come close to unlocking that one yet.  The game is OpenFeint enabled and has 19 achievements for you to earn, and there is of course a global leader board as well.  There is also multi-player promised for an update, but I’m not sure what that will entail.  If there was one “major” minor improvement I’d love to see right now it would be the ability to skip levels in Original mode.  I’d be willing to take a cut in score if I could skip some of the beginning levels of the game.

That Hurt!

Visually Trap Master is a pretty polished game.  The backgrounds look nice, though nothing really out of the ordinary as far as dungeon themed levels go.  The traps are pretty slick, and some of the death animations look like they came right out of a cartoon (for example, your character turning into a pile of ashes when fried by a laser).  The main character is almost to that “mascot” level of design and animation, especially when it comes to the aforementioned death scenes.  The one thing I don’t care for is this black fog that sweeps over the board after each level is complete.  For a while I thought there was something wrong with the lights in the room where I was playing the game.  It’s just odd and doesn’t really add anything to the game.  The sound effects for moving and collecting treasures get a bit old after a while, but I do like the sounds the various traps make.  The music is pretty decent, and suits the atmosphere of the game pretty well.

Trap Master is a fun little game.  It’s nice to have a “dodge’em” game that’s a little more than just flailing about trying to avoid everything in sight.  I also like the fact that they chose a dungeon theme, but then I am particular to the whole dungeon crawl type of thing.  The three different game modes and 19 earnable achievements should keep you busy for a while, and I’m curious to see what the multiplayer mode will bring.  This is another challenging casual game to add to your collection.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
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[All About Quick Looks]

In this week’s Saturday Specials I’m going to discuss a genre that’s absolutely perfect for the iDevice – the rolling ball game.  With the accelerometer for movement and a touch screen for jumping, the concept of a ball rolling across a series of platforms makes sense.  The problem is that it’s an easy style of game to just slap together and throw out there, so care must be taken to make something more interesting out of it without over complicating it.  Today I’ll take a look at three different games that have done that to varying degrees, some not as well as one might hope.  To start things rolling…

Funkyball Worlds

This one comes to us from Astraware, who has a pretty decent record of turning out quality mobile games.  Fortunately, Funkyball Worlds doesn’t disappoint.  The goal is to get to the end of each level.  How well you actually do in the game, however, is determined by how little time it takes you to reach the exit.  Each level can be completed without truly ranking, but certain time scores can earn you a bronze, silver or gold medal for each level.  Along the way you can pick up bronze, silver and gold stars which will deduct time from your total at the end of a level.  Unfortunately, on the other side of things there are plenty of obstacles to try and hold you back.

Rolling Through The Desert

The platform layout itself is designed to keep you thinking, instead of just presenting the standard “move from left to right” paradigm that so many of these games use.  In addition to that you’ll run into things like flame throwers, electric barriers, platforms that can only be used a certain number of times, and platforms that can only be used for a certain length of time.  These are just a few of the traps you’ll find waiting for you in the first level set, which is Forest.  In the Desert level set you have to take wind into account, and on the Water level set the gravity of the situation is different.  Each world has 24 levels that you can play through multiple times to try and get the gold star ranking, and there are 33 achievements via OpenFeint to keep you busy for quite a while.

The graphics in Funkyball World are very nice.  The multi-layered backgrounds are designed to reflect the particular world you’re in, and each has its own atmospheric items, whether it’s falling leaves in the Forest or bubbles rising to the surface in the Water level.  There are some slick little special effects as well, like the trail that follows the ball or the swirl when the ball gets sucked into the exit at the end of the level.  The sound effects are nothing special, but they work well and don’t get annoying, so I’m good with that.  I really like the music, and appreciate the fact that each world has its own theme.  I think the music in the world selection screen might even be a different tune than the worlds themselves.

This is definitely one of the better games of this style in the App Store.

Final Verdict: Recommended

Fastball

This game had special interest to me because it was developed using a program that runs on Windows (I know that won’t mean much to the non-programmer, but aspiring iPhone developers will understand the significance).  It turns out the game isn’t too bad, but it is a bit rough around the edges.  Like most games of this genre, the goal is to reach the end of each level.  Along the way you’ll collect stars, which is what gives you your points each level.  Traps are pretty standard fare in this game, consisting mainly of objects and pits to jump over.  One thing I found kind of interesting was that if you hit the edge of a platform instead of landing on top of it you die.  That makes this more of a “have to keep moving forward” game than a “let’s explore the levels” type scenario.

Into The Red

I like the fact that there are multiple paths on many levels, which actually lead to different exits.  It’s nice not always having to try to get to the same place on a given level.  I also like the fact that there are two different game play modes.  In Progress mode you actually have levels you have to beat.  In marathon mode you traverse one big level and just keep going until you hit something.  Unfortunately, the obstacles in marathon mode don’t seem to be randomly generated, which is a bit of a bummer.  I also don’t like the fact that tapping to jump seems to have issues sometimes.  Once you’ve gotten to work it appears to be fine, but I’ve had several times where I’ve had to play a level 2 or 3 times before I could actually jump.

The graphics are nothing to write home about, but they aren’t terrible either.  The ball is probably the most detailed element, with everything else basically being outlines of objects.  There aren’t really any nifty special effects, either.  There also aren’t any sound effects, which is kind of a shame.  The music is nice, but overall things just seem to quiet.  Also, while I like the music, it would have been nice to have a separate theme for the marathon and progress modes.

For a first effort this isn’t a bad game.  The problem is that for the low price point that most games sell for in the App Store, there are much better options in this genre.

Final Verdict: On The Fence

Stone Wheel

To be perfectly honest, I bought this as much to have a third item for this review as anything.  In hindsight, I might have been better of digging through my collection to see if I had anything else to fill the gap.  It’s not that Stone Wheel is necessarily an awful game, but it’s certainly not great.  It takes a few unique twists to the rolling ball genre.  Some work, some don’t.  Unfortunately, the end result is a hodgepodge that’s more frustrating than fun.

Who Lost Their Wheel?

First of all, you’re a wheel, not a ball.  That’s fine with me, as a change of theme is always refreshing.  Second, you can’t jump.  This is where the game gets a bit weird.  To move between platforms – at least ones that you can’t just roll between – you’ll need to use red platforms that allow you to bounce and little things that look like nails which cause you to fly in the air.  It’s actually an interesting concept, but the level designs are so maddening that you soon don’t care about the novelty of not jumping.  If you’re using the accelerometer for movement, staying on a moving platform is next to impossible.  After a while I ended up switching to using touch to move the wheel, but in the end I don’t think it would make much of a difference.  You’ll basically spend a few minutes fighting with each level, ultimately beat it with a sigh of relief that it’s over, and after about an hour realize that you’ve beaten the whole game.

The graphics are kind of a mess.  The wheel and some of the objects like torches don’t look bad.  The platforms look like they were haphazardly pieced together, and there are lots of places where you can see seams between images.  The backgrounds look like leftovers from a default wallpaper package for Windows XP.  Sound effects and music are non-existent, which only adds to the blah nature of the environment.

I applaud the fact that the developer tried to do something different, but this game needs some cleaning up before it can compete with its contemporaries.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended

That’s it for this week.  I don’t know what next week has in store, but rest assured whatever topic it is, the reviews will come in a set of three.  Until then…

Let's Do The Time Warp Again

So what are you trying to do in Spirit?  It seems your part of the world has been overrun with bad guys (I’m embellishing, as there really isn’t a story), and it’s up to you to get rid of them.  To do this you control Spirit, and you must use Spirit to send the bad guys to another dimension.  You create dimensional portals by warping space, which is accomplished when you create a complete loop.  Anything caught into the loop will be sucked into the other dimension, never to be seen from again.  Even cooler, as the loop shrinks, things can still get caught in it.  Bonus!  You get combo points for catching more than one bad guy with the same loop.  You can also form links with multiple loops, but I don’t completely understand the concept behind that.  I think a link occurs if you capture bad guys in a loop while another loop is still on the screen.  Either way, you get bonus points for that as well.

You start out with three lives, and when all your lives are gone you die.  You lose a life if you run into a bad guy or if you get shot by one in the later levels.  The game isn’t just kind enough to hand over extra lives, either.  An extra life will look like a smaller version of you and be attached to a bad guy, and you must capture the bad guy to free the extra life.  Be cautious, though, because extra lives can get sucked into the other dimension as well.  Even once you free the extra life you have to run into it to pick it up – the game doesn’t just give it to you.  As for the bad guys, they come in all shapes and sizes.  There isn’t really any level design, per se, as the playing field is nothing more than a rectangle.  What I really like, however, is the fact that not only is the mix of bad guys different in each level of the same game, but the mix of monsters in level 2-1 of game A won’t be the same mix as that in level 2-1 of game B.  You are constantly forced to get used to something new, which is a nice change of pace.

Why So Blue?

Controlling the game is simple enough.  There are no power ups, so all you have to do is move Spirit around.  You do this by dragging your finger around the screen.  Spirit’s movement is relative to yours, so your finger doesn’t have to be right in front of Spirit for Spirit to move.  The plus side of this is that your hand doesn’t have to get in the way of your view, or at least not completely.  The down side for me, however, is that I didn’t feel like I had nearly as much control when my finger wasn’t right next Spirit.  If it’s something you can get used to, however, I’d strongly suggest trying not to stick right by Spirit.  It really does help your perception of the playing field when your hand is not right on top of your character.

Spirit looks great.  The objects are simple neon outlines, but the effects with the board warping – whether it be bad guys popping in or a dimensional gate forming – are awesome.  The trail that Spirit creates is pretty cool looking as well.  I even like the sound effects, though I can’t seem to put my finger on why (no pun intended).  There’s nothing special about them, but they just happen to sound good without ever getting obnoxious.  The music is wonderful.  I’m at a loss to say “it sounds like…”, but whatever it sounds like it’s good.  It’s easy to listen to and gives you this false sense of ease so that you’re not prepared for the screen being completely full of enemies.  Devious!

I’m usually the type of guy to say “it’s about the game play”, but the truth is Spirit is as much a balance of atmosphere and game play as anything.  The game play is almost too simple, yet it can get addicting if you’re not careful.  There’s always this anticipation that the next level will bring some strange new creature with it that you haven’t seen before.  If you stop to listen to the music for a few minutes, you’ll never want to leave.  This is one of those games that should become a classic, because it’s continued proof that you don’t need fancy 3D and complex mechanics to win us over.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
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[All About Quick Looks]

Eliminate The Virus

The basics of Flu Fighter are that you have a bunch of viruses that need to be eliminated and thankfully are color coded for ease of disposal.  Pills fall from the top of the screen, and these pills are divided into two parts, each of a certain color as well.  Your job is to pile the pills on the viruses such that at least 3 pill parts matching the virus’ color are actually touching the virus.  When that happens, the virus will go away.  When all the viruses are gone you’ve cleared the level and will move on to the next one.  If the pills should happen to pile up such that no new ones can fall from the top, the game is over.  Have no fear, though – you’ll never have to start completely over.  At the beginning of each game you can choose a level to start from anywhere between 0 and 20.  You can also pick between three speeds: slow, medium and fast.

The controls are actually quite interesting, and it’s a shame they don’t work a little better.  To rotate the pills you simply tap the screen.  Tapping the left half causes the pill to rotate counterclockwise, while the right half turns the pill clockwise.  To move the pill left or right you swipe the screen in the appropriate direction.  The problem with this is two fold.  First of all, it doesn’t always seem to respond to the swipe.  Not a big problem, but it can cause issues sometimes.  The bigger problem, however, is that each swipe only moves the pill over one place.  When the pills are moving fast and the viruses are close to the top of the screen, this doesn’t really give you the needed time to move the pills anywhere useful.  I also found the need to swipe up in order to get pills to automatically drop to the bottom of the screen a bit awkward.  Not because it didn’t work well, but because it would seem to me to be more natural to swipe down for this.

My real problem with Flu Fighter, however, is that there’s not a lot of incentive to keep on playing.  The game keeps track of high scores, but there are no other achievements of any kind.  Aside from the ability to adjust the starting level and speed, there’s no variance from game to game.  There are no game modes other than standard play (and multi-player if you have a friend and Wi-Fi), and there are no obstacles or power ups to make the play in standard mode very interesting.  There is an odd bug that creeps up once in a while, however, that makes certain blocks intangible so that pills just pass right through them.  This can be a problem if you think you’re going to match a pill to a virus and suddenly the pill just keeps on going.  I guess you could consider it an obstacle, but it’s not a proper one.

The graphics in Flu Fighter are decent.  The background could stand to be switch around every once in a while, but the viruses look good and are well animated.  There aren’t a whole lot of effects, but the sparkle when blocks disappear is snazzy.  Sound effects are a bit blah, and the music is interesting because it could be good, but currently sounds more like just the beginning of a song than a full fledged tune.

I’m torn on this one.  It’s one of the better mobile Dr. Mario clones I’ve played, but it still needs some work before I’d consider it really good.  If you’re truly looking for a Dr. Mario fix this might get you by, but it’s not going to hold your attention for long spurts at a time.  The game hasn’t been updated for several months, so I have a feeling this developer is done with it, but maybe someone else will pick it up as an example and give us the Dr. Mario game we’re all craving.  Until then, I’d suggest trying the free version before shelling out any cash for this one.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
App Store Link
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[All About Quick Looks]

Fly-flap is a game where you must clear away the flies.  To get rid of a fly you need to tap on it.  Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?  In the beginning it is.  As the game progresses, though, the flies get faster.  Also, you’ll get introduced to the bug, which can cause a big stink if you accidentally click on it.  There’s even a spider which is actually a good thing, because you can drag a fly into the spider’s mouth for bonus points.  Of course, this temporarily distracts you from the rest of the board, but it’s amusing!  When you successfully tap a fly it will release a bubble which you can click for bonus points as well.  Be wary, though, because if you accidentally tap an empty spot on the screen the meter on the left will go down, and when it’s empty the game is over.

Here Comes The Spider

There are actually two modes to Fly-Flap: Campaign and Arcade.  Arcade mode simply walks you through a series of levels, each one more hectic than the last.  You have to tap a certain number of flies on each level, and if you miss too many before reaching your quota you lose and have to start over.  In Campaign mode there are a series of levels that each has a goal, like needing to feed a certain amount of spiders or trying to dodge bugs for a certain length of time.  The campaign mode is a lot of fun, but sadly there are only 10 levels in this mode.  Once you’ve beaten a level in campaign mode you can keep retrying that level to better your score, but I hope at some point they consider adding a bunch of levels to this mode, even if it’s through downloadable content.

To help (or hinder) your progress there are several bonuses.  On the good side you get anti-fly spray, which lets you swipe to kill multiple flies at once instead of tapping.  A horn will clear the screen of all flies, and “blinding” temporarily dazes the flies, making them easy to hit.  These bonuses can be collected and used when you choose.  There’s also a bonus that slows the flies down, and this gets applied automatically when you tap it.  On the down side there’s double trouble, which swarms the screen with flies.  There’s also a bonus that makes the flies go faster, and one that causes you to see double (or triple, even), making it hard to decide which is the right fly to hit.  Despite the difficulties it causes, I actually like this negative bonus in concept.

Dazed And Confused

The visuals in Fly-flap are great.  These flies are not your average, wimpy garden variety flies, but rather bulbous, sarcastic looking beasts that like to stick their tongues out at you and grin with these conniving, crooked toothed grins.   I also love the look of the spider as he’s eating a fly.  There’s no question that the animation is quality.  They also did a good job with the backdrops, giving them a cartoon look that fits the whole atmosphere of the game.  The sound effects also work quite well.  The “num num num” of a feasting spider cracks me up, as well as the less than energetic “yea” emitted any time you score a bonus item.  The thing that sticks out the most, though, is when I died with a screen full of laughing flies (around level 13 on arcade mode).  Talk about an eerie sensation.  As for the music, well, let’s just say that it doesn’t even come close to the quality of the rest of the aesthetics.  In fact, I spent about 10 minutes listening to it while working on something else, and I don’t think I’d care to ever listen to it again.

Fly-Flap is a lot of fun.  It’s a simple concept that’s executed well, and it’s amusing to watch and listen to.  I do hope they consider adding more campaign levels, and that background music has got to go, but otherwise there is plenty to like here.  This is the kind of game that mobile devices were made for, and it’s definitely earned it’s place on mine.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
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[All About Quick Looks]

Boardwalk Games is comprised of 3 mini-games: Balloon Safari, Tiki Toss and Spill Da Milk.  Balloon Safari is definitely the most diverse of the three games, but is actually my least favorite, just because the controls are a bit off compared to the other ones.  I’m sure it’s because they are trying to accurately simulate the flight of the darts, but it drives me nuts.  In other words, I’m no good at it.  At any rate, no matter which game you pick the control scheme is roughly the same.  You press on the object you wish you throw and drag it around the screen.  When the targeting circle encompasses the object you wish to hit you let go of the screen.  There almost always seems to be a little bit of variance between where you thought you let go and where the object actually flies, but this is most noticeable when it comes to Balloon Safari.  Also, if you have any kind of covering that makes the bottom edge of your device a little “fatter”, you might find it somewhat challenging to hit the bottom row of Tikis in Tiki Toss.

Spill Da Milk

Each game has two modes.  Quick Play mode for any of the games is basically a “score as many points as you can until time runs out” mode.  Personally, I’m not a big fan of this mode no matter which game you’re talking about.  I like the Progressive mode.  For Tiki Toss and Spill Da Milk, each level of progressive mode requires you to score a certain number of points within a time limit in order to progress to the next level.  In Tiki Toss a randomly selected Tiki will become the “bonus points” Tiki for a few seconds, and this job will continually rotate as time wears down.  It’s in your best interest to hit as many bonus point Tikis as you can.  In Spill Da Milk you occasionally get a brown colored milk bottle, which gives you some extra time, or a green colored bottle, which awards you extra points.  Spill Da Milk has an extra little caveat in that even if you’ve knocked all the bottles down at a particular table, the table won’t be reloaded until all the bottles have actually rolled off the table.

When playing in Progressive mode for Balloon Safari it’s like playing 3 mini-games within a mini-game.  In the first level you simply need to score as many points as you can by popping balloons.  In level 2 you must pop groups of balloons in order to get points.  For example, if the first balloon you pop is red, you must pop another red balloon in order to get any score for that sequence. A missed shot will not break the sequence, but hitting a different colored balloon will.  The final level for each set is a matching game, as each balloon on the board has a picture of an animal behind it.  Every time you match two animals correctly all the rest of the pictures that are left will be shown briefly.  If at all possible, the best course is to find one pair during that brief reveal so that you can keep progressing in the level.  You’ll keep cycling through these three types of levels until you fail to complete one.

The Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room

All of the games look good graphically, but I’d say my favorite is the Tiki Toss.  Each of the Tikis is animated when they are selected as the bonus points tiki, whether it entails them sticking out their tongue or having their eyes glow.  Plus, I like how the shelves rock and the cloth flap behind the tikis ripples when you hit it.  Spill Da Milk is kind of plain (how much can you do with Milk bottles?) though I do really like the backdrop which has a couple of cows that look like they are suffering from the Tom & Jerry version of mad cow disease.  The Balloon Safari is okay, but nothing in that game really sticks out as being nifty.

I’m really impressed with the sound effects in this game.  From the clank of the milk bottles to the popping of balloons, everything sounds authentic.  The one that gets me the most, however, is Tiki Toss.  Hitting a tiki sounds different than hitting a shelf, which also sounds different than hitting the backdrop.  A lot of times in games like this they tend to skimp on such distinctions, but the attention to detail here adds greatly to the authenticity of the game.  If you closed your eyes, you could almost picture yourself actually being at a fair.  All we need is the smell of funnel cakes and some hollering “step right up!”  The music is also very well done.  The music that plays while you’re “wandering the boardwalk” makes you feel like you’re trudging around a carnival, though it could use the sound of a roller coaster to be complete.  Each of the games has their own track as well, which is actually kind of unusual for a Skyworks game, and is greatly appreciated.

Overall I’d have to say that Boardwalk Games is one of my favorite Skyworks games.  The attention to detail, especially when it comes to sound, is some of the best I’ve seen from them.  The mini-games are fun, and it’s a challenge to try and find ways to better your score every time you play.  There’s even a secret spot on each game that you can hit to increase your time by ten seconds.  Little touches like that tend to impress me.  I will probably still never plop down $10 to try and knock down milk cans in real life, but don’t be surprised if you find me testing my luck on this virtual boardwalk every now and again.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
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[All About Quick Looks]

IO

This is one of those typical sci-fi scenarios – ship lost at space, crew has vanished, what happened?  It’s up to you to find out and bring the ship safely home.  You can rest assured that if something like this ever became a reality I would not be in charge – or anywhere near – the rescue crew, because I would just add to the mystery.  I have as yet to make it past the second bad guy in this game, and after I’m finished with this review I will be more than happy to delete IO from my device and never try again.  I think there is a lot of potential here – a nice “rails” platform game that still has a sense of depth, hidden areas in multiple layers of the ship, a cool atmosphere.  All the makings for a deep space thriller are there.

Isn't He From Robocop?

Unfortunately, the game is just too difficult.  On top of that, small things in the interface just bug me, like the fact that the toggle button for running, walking and crouching is a bit flaky.  Also, as I found out the hard way, if you try to select a gun you don’t own yet, it unselects your previous gun, leaving you unarmed.  Shooting doesn’t seem entirely accurate either, which is somewhat essential for a game like this.  You’re supposed to tap on the screen where you want to shoot, but I think the pseudo 3D nature of the levels confuses the targeting sometimes, and you can be standing right next to a guy and tapping on him, yet you aren’t actually hitting him.  It gets quite frustrating after a while.

Visually IO is okay.  The actual playing field is only about one third of the full screen, so the graphics aren’t overly detailed.  The background colors are kind of muddled to give the game an ominous atmosphere, but in the end they just look muddled.  I do like how foreground objects and things that can be interacted with are more colorful to stand out, but that has a mixed effect of almost making things feel cartoonish.  The sound effects are pretty basic sci-fi affair, and there is no music, which I think is absolutely essential for a game like this.  In the end, though, sloppy controls and insane difficulty are IO’s downfall.  Fix those two things, and this could be a decent platform game.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
App Store Link

Zingles

I’m not really sure what the name Zingles means, but basically this is another variation on Sudoku.  Sudoku is a game of logic and numbers.  The standard version uses the numbers 1 through 9, and the object is to fill the board such that each row and each column contains the numbers 1 through 9, and each 3×3 grid within the board also contains the numbers 1 through 9.  It sounds a bit odd, but once you actually play it the game can be a blast, and it can certainly tax your reasoning skills.

Well, It's Sudoku

My general philosophy about electronic Sudoku has been “Sudoku is Sudoku, and it’s all about the interface”.  Well it turns out that Zingles challenges that philosophy by actually presenting variations on the game.  You can play on a nice selection of board sizes, ranging from 4×4 (definitely designed for kids) all the way to 16×16 (requires the use of the letters A-G in addition to numbers).  There are also two variants called Jigsaw and Killer, but sadly the game has no instructions, so I’m not sure what’s different about these modes, though looking at them tells me they are different.  To fill a square you double tap it and select the number or letter that you want in that square.  To take notes you select a square and then tap the pencil icon, and whatever letters / numbers you tap will show up in the square as suggestions and not your final answer.  There are a couple of other icons as well, but without some help I’m not really sure what they do.

Visually the game looks fine, though there is nothing exciting about the graphical scheme.  The numbers and letters are easy to read, even on the 16×16 grid.  There is no music or sound effects, but thankfully the game supports letting you listen to your own music.  I give Zingles a shaky recommendation.  I’ve seen better interfaces on electronic versions of Sudoku, but I like the fact that there are multiple board sizes.  A game having no help is a big turn off for me, though, especially when there are modes that don’t appear in most versions of a game that I’d like to know how to play.  Still, there’s some nice variety here, and the smaller board sizes are a great way to introduce the game to your children.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link

Potpourrii

I love match 3 games, so I really thought I’d enjoy Potpourrii.  The first couple of times I tried it, however, I just didn’t get it.  Turns out that was the problem – I just didn’t get it.  Revisiting the game after all this time I realize that it’s actually a nice match 3 game with a twist, and it’s quite fun.  The playing field is a pool that contains spirits floating in it which represent the seasons.  To remove a spirit from the pool you must shoot it with a spirit from the previous season (ex: spring spirits remove summer spirits).  If the pool gets too crowded the spirits will get stuck, and if they can’t move for 5 seconds you lose a life.  When all lives are gone the game is over.  Spirits will continually be generated from four points along the pool, one for each of the seasons.  If a spirit stays queued up too long it will be launched automatically, which can result in less than desirable circumstances.

Well Done In Winter

To launch the spirits yourself you take control of a cannon that rotates 360 degrees around the pool.  Moving the cannon simply requires you to turn a wheel in the lower left corner of the screen.  Once the cannon is positioned in front of a spirit spawning point you can pick up the spirit by pressing the lower right corner of the screen.  Then you position the cannon where you’d like and press the lower right corner again to fire.  There are also supposed to be bombs that you can drag and drop to use, but so far I haven’t run across any of those yet.

The graphics in Potpourrii are both cool and functional.  There are nice little details, such as leaves floating in the pool during the fall and ducks swimming in the summer.  The spirits and gnomes look pretty neat as well, as does the little warlock in the upper left corner.  Even though he’s the evil guy, he’s actually kind of amusing, much like Gargamel from the Smurfs.  The sound effects fit the game quite well, and love the sounds of joy from the gnomes when you clear a level.  The music is okay, but I actually like the little riff that introduces a level better than the music that plays throughout the level.  If you haven’t had the opportunity to try Potpourrii yet, I highly suggest you give it a whirl.  This is one of those oldies but goodies.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link

That wraps it up for this week. Hopefully it was still Saturday somewhere when I posted this, but if not, oh well. I’m not sure what’s on tap for next week yet, but we’ll all know by the time I get it posted next week, won’t we?

In Tilt To Live you control a small white ship – or a triangle with flames coming out of it, depending on how you want to look at things.  The little area you call home is being overrun by viscous red dots, and your sole purpose is to avoid them as long as you can before being overcome.  Well, okay, that’s not really true.  Your job is to take as many of them down with you as you possibly can.  To do that you will be provided with randomly generated pickups that unleash weapons of mass destruction upon the unsuspecting dots.  Maybe the U.S. military should have looked here first.  The down side is that weapons get activated the moment you collide with them.  The plus side is that they are a whole lot of fun to use!

Here Comes The Ice...

So what are these weapons I speak of?  The base arsenal comes in three flavors: pink, yellow and red.  The pink weapon is some kind of burst that can do a whole lot of damage.  Unfortunately it takes a couple of seconds to charge once activated, and it must be aimed.  Just make sure you don’t turn the wrong way at the last moment.  Next are the guided “missiles” which take out a few bad guys and sound like insane fireworks.  Finally you have the little nuclear explosion that disintegrates anything that comes into contact with the cloud.  This is great to get rid of a lot of dots in close range, but not effective for much else.  The first unlockable is an ice weapon, which again has limited effectiveness except for close range, but it looks way cool.  Keep in mind that frozen dots are NOT dead dots, however.  Just a friendly tip from your less than expert triangle flier.  There are other nifty gadgets to be unleashed as well, which I’d report on if I could actually unlock them, but I’m not very good at the game (I got to use some of them in the preview build, but my mind forgets easily).

The game is simple to control.  You tilt the device.  For those that haven’t caught on yet, that’s where the title Tilt To Live comes from.  You tilt… to live.  Pretty creative, huh?  I will say that I found their calibration menu, “Assume The Position”, somewhat amusing the first time I saw it.  Why?  I don’t really know.  I guess I’m just easily amused.  Whatever the case, you have default positions of “standard”, “top-down” and “sleepy”, and of course you can self-calibrate if you like.  And please, get your minds out of the gutter.  Before I leave the gameplay section I’d like to briefly mention the achievement system as well.  Normally I don’t necessarily care about such things, unless there’s nothing else in the game that interests me.  However, I find the achievements in Tilt To Live quite humorous.  It doesn’t hurt that several of those achievements are unlocking new weapons as well, which makes it all worth it.

And Now For Some Lightning

To say the graphics are simple does the game a disservice.  I mean sure the villains are red dots.  Your space ship looks like the top view of a paper airplane with a little flame coming out of it.  But all the effects are so cool.  I dare you not to be impressed the first time you unleash the ice weapon.  When a bunch of dots get together to form a large red arrow that points at you – pure Tom & Jerry.  Let’s not forget the swirling green backdrop either.  You rebels from the 60’s will appreciate that.  The sound effects are pretty decent as well, which is often not the case for more casual games like this.  I especially like the sounds associated with the missile and ice weapons.  The music steals the show as far as audio is concerned, though.  I think I said it in my preview, but I’ll say it again anyway.  The music reminds me of a blend of The Mask and Ratatouille, with just a hint of Danny Elfman thrown in.  It’s only one song, but it never gets old.  I suppose it could just be that I die rather quickly, though.

If you only by one “dodge ‘em all” game this year, make it Tilt To Live.  If you plan on buying more than one, make sure this is one of the ones you buy.  If you weren’t planning on buying any, you should really reevaluate your purchasing system and buy this one.  Did I mention you should buy this?  Anyway, I’m not going to restate the reasons why here – you can reread the rest of the review for that.  I’m just going to go back to playing now.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link
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[All About Quick Looks]

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Bob Katayama Executive Editor

Slug Wars is one of those games where you start at one side of the screen, the opponent starts at the other, and the goal is to get a certain number of troops over to your opponent’s side of the screen.  In this case the magic number is three.  It doesn’t seem like a very daunting task, except for the fact that it seems to be one of those deals where it’s not going to happen unless you get that one line that’s configured in just the right order to keep the opponent at bay.  Then, it seems like there’s no stopping it.  There doesn’t appear to be a middle ground where you get 1 guy in over here and another guy in over there.  And when you’re on the receiving end of that attack where the opponents are so close together you can’t squeeze a troop in between attackers, you pretty much just sit back and watch your team lose.  At least with most strategy games you can crank troops out until the bitter end, even though some of them might not actually make it out onto the field before you’ve been conquered.

Slugs Get Thirsty Too

So how do you place troops into battle?  It’s simple: you just press the row where you want the troop to go.  Assuming you have enough money the troop will be placed and start slithering its way towards the opponent’s side.  There have been a couple of times where I’ve been unable to place a troop for no apparent reason, but there’s nothing to indicate that you can only have a certain number of troops out at once.  In fact, the help is quite basic.  It simply explains how to place a troop and what you need in order to win.  It doesn’t elaborate on the different troop types or on the different game play modes.  When a slug is killed a flower appears in its place.  Your slugs have to eat the flowers in order to gain money to buy more slugs.  It’s like some weird form of recycling.  Basically you just keep placing troops on the tracks until you run out of either space or money, then wait for some fighting to commence, then repeat.  It’s kind of fun for a while, but then it just gets monotonous, especially with the lack of a fast forward button.

There are three different modes: campaign, skirmish and slug-it-out.  Slug-it-out is two humans on the same device, which means picking someone you’re not afraid of being close to, since this is a real time game.  Skirmish mode was pretty much senseless, because you start off with way too much money and after a while it doesn’t feel like it’s ever possible for there to be a winner.  Campaign mode offers a series of small levels, at least in the sense that they take less time than Skirmish mode.  The problem here is that other than a label saying “Level X” for whatever level you’re on, there’s really nothing tying the levels together.  A story with some cut scenes would be nice.  Of course, it would also be nice if there were some point to the levels besides just “get to the other side”.  The one nice thing about Campaign mode is this is where you can unlock additional troop types, since you only start out with two.

The game starts out with a basic “foot” soldier and a bazooka soldier.  The grunts are cheap and fast, but they have to be right up against the enemy to do any damage.  The bazooka soldier is slower, but can shoot the enemies from somewhat of a distance.  So far I’ve managed to unlock the Kamikaze slug, which destroys itself and its opponent in one fell swoop by pouring salt on both of them.  As an added bonus it leaves a pile of salt that blocks both sides until it has disappeared.  Unfortunately I haven’t seen the other unit types yet, because it seems they’ve been pretty creative with design of the units.  The game just hasn’t held my interest enough to keep pursing it.

Gotta Love The Salt Shaker

Slug Wars is aesthetically pleasing.  Each unit has its own personality visually, and the units have a distinct cry when you unleash them on the playing field.  The actual combat noises are pretty standard, though it is kind of amusing hearing a salt shaker when the Kamikaze attacks.  The slugs also make a weird squishy / watery noise when they bite the bullet.  It almost sounds like they are dissolving into a pile of goop.  Sadly, there is no music playing in the background during combat.

I think Slug Wars has a lot of potential.  It was nice to see a strategy game centering around creepy crawling creatures that wasn’t a Scorched Earth clone.  Plus, the unit types were interesting (while there were a couple that I didn’t get the chance to use yet, they looked cool).  As the game stands right now, though, it just isn’t that interesting.  The campaign mode somehow needs some variety.  I think a fast forward button might help a bit as well, though that could ultimately interfere with the game play.  Slug Wars just needs something to pick up the pace a bit.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
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In Meltdown you play Emgee, a maintenance droid for nuclear power plants.  Your job is to travel through a series of plants, deactivating each of 5 reactors within a given plant to ensure that the plant doesn’t go into meltdown.  To deactivate a reactor you must press all the red switches that exist in the reactor.  The task is simple, but the execution can certainly prove to be a challenge.  Each level is timed, and your only respite to the timer are cooling rods that you pick up in some levels, though these rods only add 5 seconds to your time.  You also earn a rod for each reactor you successfully shut down in a plant, and these rods can be used in subsequent plants.  Rods found within a level can be used in the plant you’re currently working on.  The down to the rods is that they are automatically used when your time runs out, so if you’re on a level you know you aren’t going to complete anyway – too bad.  That’s one caveat I wish they would have changed from the PocketPC version.

Give It Some Thurst

Besides the time limit, timing plays a major factor in Meltdown.  Emgee is in constant motion, and the only thing that can change his direction is colliding with something.  While you can’t directly affect his left / right movement, you can provide him with some upward mobility.  Emgee can jump, and when he’s already in the air he can use a jetpack to get some additional lift.  Both of these actions are initiated by pressing the screen, and the longer you hold the more powerful each action becomes.  Keep in mind that the jetpack can only be activated while you’re in the air, however, so if you start the meter with the intention of using the jetpack but don’t let go until Emgee touches the ground, you’ll simply jump instead.  It’s also important to remember that just because you can fill the meter, it doesn’t mean you should.  Learning how to judge jumping / jetpack strength will be key to solving a lot of these levels.

You didn’t think that would be all that’s standing in your way, did you?  In the beginning you can flip the red switches in any order you want.  As you get further along in the game, however, you must start flipping switches in a particular order.  Additionally, there are electric barriers that must be deactivated, pools of reactor coolant that must be jumped, and nuclear gremlins that can’t wait to take a byte out of your circuitry (sorry, had to be punny there).  It certainly won’t be a breeze walking through some of the later levels in this game, but what fun is a game without any challenge, right?

Gremlins Are Everywhere

Meltdown has very nice graphics if you look in the background.  The foreground layer is actually kind of blah, but there are some nice details in the parallax levels scrolling behind you.  Emgee himself is pretty cool looking, and I still think he’d make a great mascot.  The nuclear gremlins aren’t too shabby either.  The sound effects compliment the atmosphere perfectly.  I especially like the voice of Emgee, though I wish he’d say more.  The music has a nice rock beat to it which fits perfectly with the frantic pace of the game.

I was happy to see Meltdown finally get ported to the iPhone, and I’m not disappointed at all by the translation after having spent some time with it.  There’s plenty of challenge as you progress through the plants, and it amazes me how they can make such a playable game with basically one button for control.  There are two difficulty settings that determine how many reactors you must deactivate to save a plant, and Crystal integration gives you a bunch of nice achievements to work towards.  Meltdown is certainly worth adding to your iPhone collection.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Thumpies are odd, furry little creatures with an innate sense of rhythm that like to bounce around and eat butterflies.  Each level contains three or more platforms that the Thumpies can bounce on, and it’s your job to help them find the beat by tapping on the platforms when they bounce on them.  A correctly timed tap will produce a sound and add to the meter at the top of the screen.  When the meter is full you have beaten the level.  If you get enough correct taps in a row the Thumpies will become electrified and the meter will fill up twice as fast, but that goes away with the first missed tap.  There are also butterflies flittering around that you can tap.  Collecting these butterflies allows you to unlock additional Tumpies to play with.  If your completion meter falls to 0 any butterflies that you’ve captured will fly away.  When the completion meter is full any captured butterflies will added to your total count.  Be warned, though, Thumpies like to eat butterflies, so you have to get to them before they do!

Here Come The Thumpies

Like any good rhythm game, the key to Thumpies is timing.  Unlike most rhythm games, however, each Thumpie has a set pattern.  As such, the game has a Simon like element to it in the sense that if you memorize the pattern of each Thumpie it will make it easier for you to beat the level.  On the plus side, all you have to do is tap the screen on the corresponding platform when a Thumpie bounces.  The problem is that when you get more than one Thumpie going, especially if they are moving quickly, the touch response seems a bit shaky.  It gets worse when there are butterflies flittering around and you try and tap on them in between bounces.  It’s not always an issue, as there are some levels with a bunch of platforms and Thumpies that I was able to score pretty high on, but in some cases I literally had to just keep tapping all the platforms and hoping I got enough taps timed right that I could finally finish the level.

There’s certainly plenty of replay value with Thumpies.  Every level has three difficulty settings, which for most people should provide a good amount of challenge.  The only thing I don’t like about this is that it doesn’t appear that scores are kept by difficulty, but just by level.  It would be nice to know within a level what my best score on each difficulty setting was.  There’s also the matter of unlocking all of the Thumpies, which should keep you busy for a little while.  And, some of the levels are just plain fun to play over and over again.

Want Me Some Butterflies

The world of Thumpies looks good.  There’s a nice variety of detailed backgrounds, and the Thumpies themselves are quite interesting to look at.  I’m not sure whether I’d classify the Thumpies as looking cute or disturbing, but either way they are quite fascinating.  The sound effects are great.  There’s a laugh at certain times that sounds just like the crazy reindeer from the Santa Clause movies, and I can’t help but smile every time I hear it.  In fact, I found myself smiling quite a bit at the sounds in this game.  They’re just so much fun.  The music is also interesting.  You might start out with a light melody or nothing at all, and each sequence of Thumpies that you successfully complete builds on the background music for the next sequence.  I thought it was a very creative way of handling the music.

I’ve not been a big fan of the whole rhythm genre of games, but as variants like Beat It and Thumpies comes out I’m starting to appreciate the genre a little bit more.  Thumpies in particular has an addictive quality about it.  I’m not sure whether it’s because of the need to collect them all, the funny sounds the Thumpies make, or just the frantic nature of game play in general.  I do hope they consider revisiting the controls at some point, though, because this is a game where responsiveness is key and I don’t feel that when there are several Thumpies on screen at once.  Otherwise, Thumpies delivers some intense fun that will keep you coming back again and again.

Final Verdict: Recommended

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In Arachnadoodle you play a cute little doodle spider, and your mission is to travel through 32 rooms, connecting pins and capturing flies.  The main goal of each room is to pass over each pin at least once.  You must do this in order to pass the level and unlock the next room.  The secondary goal is to build a strong web.  The more strands you have connecting the pegs, the stronger your web will be.  The stronger your web, the more flies you’ll catch at the end, and the higher your score will be.  Even if you don’t connect all the pegs you’ll still be able to catch flies at the end of the level, but your game will be over.  You only get a certain number of jumps to connect all the pegs, so you must use your jumps wisely.

This Game Has Gone Down The Toilet

To jump you simply drag your finger in the direction you want to jump and let go.  The further you are from the spider the more powerful the jump will be.  If you hit a wall you’ll bounce back, and as you make your descent you can hit more pegs.  There are several obstacles you have to be wary of.  Yellow pegs are elastic and will alter your trajectory.  Death’s Head Bugs explode on contact, taking away an extra jump and destroying any threads within a certain proximity of the bug when it explodes.  You stick to furniture, which can make a jump less profitable.  Lamps and certain kinds of bugs will give you a bit of a shock should you collide with them.  On the plus side there are bugs that will give you bonus score should you collide with them, and blue bugs will give you an extra throw.

The aesthetics are all about cute.  The backgrounds look like drawings from a kid’s book and are rendered in pleasant pastel colors.  The characters are cartoony, though I don’t think it’s fair to label this game in the “doodle” category, because the graphics still look better and more detailed than most doodle games.  The sound effects are great.  I especially love it when the spider hollers “yeah”.  It really sounds more like a mouse than a spider, but it cracks me up every time.  The music is nice and light, and very bouncy.  The theme played when you’re capturing flies at the end of each level is some well known classical piece, though my utter lack of culture prohibits me from actually recalling the name.  You’ll recognize it immediately when you hear it, though.

The biggest hurdle this game will have for serious puzzle gamers is its child like exterior.  Don’t let that fool you, however.  Some of the levels in this game are very challenging.  If you’re a fan of The Secret Of Bryce Manor you’ll appreciate Arachnadoodle for when you want somewhat similar gameplay but a much more jovial atmosphere.  Overall this is a fun little game and deserves more recognition than it is probably getting.

Final Verdict: Recommended

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If you’ve never played a breakout style game, the basic idea is that you have an area full of bricks that you are trying to destroy.  Normally this would be a rectangular section at the top of the screen, but in Radial 50 your target area is a circle in the center of the screen.  Your weapon is normally a paddle at the bottom of the screen that you use to bounce a ball up into the bricks, but in this case it’s a curved surface that travels the circumference of a bigger circle surrounding the main playing area.  You still have to hit a ball into the bricks in the center to make them go away, but in addition you have an ultimate target, which is a diamond at the center of the inner circle.  You also have a larger “area of destruction”, as you get hurt if the ball hits anywhere on the outer circle.  Thankfully you have a life meter that initially gives you five hits before the game is over, and the health meter will slowly replenish over time.

Follow The Yellow Brick Road

If a brick turns white it will give you a power up or power down when you hit it.  There doesn’t seem to be as great a variety of power ups as most other breakout clones that I’ve played.  Some that I’ve encountered so far include making the paddle bigger or smaller, speeding up the ball, and giving the ball the ability to plow through bricks instead of just bouncing off of them. As long as you’re quick enough to get to the other side, this last power up is my favorite.  To control the paddle you simply slide your finger up and down the right side of the screen.  For the most part this works, but if you get really caught up in the game and aren’t watching your finger, it’s easy to start sliding around the screen to where you’re out of the acceptable range of motion, at which point odd things can start happening.  I personally find the control scheme a bit awkward.  I think I’d prefer a scheme where I hit two buttons, one to rotate clockwise and the other counterclockwise.

Radial 50 looks pretty cool.  There are odd little machines in the background, and the space surrounding the machine changes according to the theme envisioned by the title of the level.  The playing field itself is kind of simple but still looks decent enough, and as you break bricks little sparkle stars coming flying towards the outer circle.  The sound effects are pretty standard for this type of game, but the music sounds good.  There seems to be several different tracks that are toggled through as the game progresses, and they are all pretty easy to listen to.

Overall Radial 50 is not a bad game, but taking the breakout genre into a 360 degree arena apparently wasn’t enough of an evolution to catch my interest.  I’m also a bit disappointed that there isn’t a greater variety of power ups.  However, I would suggest checking this game out if you’re a fan of the genre, because 360 degrees of playing field certainly adds a new element to the strategy of the game.  The game looks and sounds good, so it has that going for it as well. Maybe some new feature or gimmick will finally suck me into the genre, but I’m not quite there yet.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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There’s never really a story presented to you, but from what I gather Daisy Mae is quite the businesswoman, because she’s had the sense to open up a diner right outside the fence of Area 51.  So what’s the main course, you ask?  Well, in case you missed the title of the game, it’s aliens!  And make no mistake about it, poor Daisy really has to work to hunt down some of these delicacies.  As with most dual stick shooters, you basically run around a predefined area blasting everything that has a desire to snack on you.  You start out with twin Tommy guns, which despite their unlimited ammo are quite weak (hence the unlimited ammo).

Open For Business

Along the way you’ll pick up several different types of weapons, from a bizarre dual-head laser gun to what appears to be a giant air-pressured staple gun!  In an interesting twist it seems you can only hold one weapon at a time, but at least you set the other weapon down so you can pick it up again later if you wish.  You have three lives denoted by lipstick smooches, and you can replenish these lives by picking up lipstick containers left by the aliens.  Unfortunately you can’t stockpile them either, which I suppose is only rational because let’s face it – where would Daisy put them?  The other special you get is Daisy’s “infatuation” ray.  As you slay aliens a meter fills up, and when it’s reached the top you can unleash your womanly wiles to seduce the bad guys to death (I guess all the aliens are guys).  The meter appears to have three different levels depending on how much “love damage” you wish to inflict.

The aliens are plenty and they are mean.  And, unlike games like iDracula and Minigore where you have small, medium and sometimes large, in Daisy Mae’s world there’s small, large and “what, is that a house?”   So don’t feel bad if you spend a lot of time running.  To help facilitate that you’ll control Daisy’s movements via a virtual thumb stick.  On the other hand (literally) you have three different options for controlling how Daisy shoots.  The first is to go autopilot, which I guess doesn’t really count as a control method since you’re not actually controlling anything.  The second is to have a button for shooting.  The problem with these two methods is that auto-targeting is employed as well.  If you are dealing with a few enemies, auto-targeting works out pretty well.  When you have a lot of bad guys to fend off and you want to dispatch certain ones first, these aren’t such good options.  The third option is the second thumb stick we’ve all come to know and love.  I actually seemed to fare the best with the button for shooting, but I prefer the thumb stick just because I feel that I’m participating more.

Get That Girl An Altoid

Daisy’s world is very nice to look at (and I’m talking about the whole thing, you pervs).  The aliens clearly have their roots in old school drive through theater, yet they’re not quite like anything you’ve seen before.  The backdrop is filled with interesting objects, from a complete playground to an abandoned tank.  Everything is nicely rendered, though as you get close to some objects you’ll note that they appear more flat like the scenery in Minigore than actual 3D.  The main down side to the visuals is that the view is zoomed out quite a bit to accommodate the really big aliens, so you can’t always appreciate all the details (on the aliens and scenery, you gutter dwellers!)  The sound effects are actually somewhat blasé.  Guns sound like guns, Daisy whimpers a bit when she gets hit, and the aliens don’t make much noise at all other than the popping of the bullets hitting them.  This seems to be a growing trend where aliens don’t make any sounds.  Anyone ever watch Star Wars?  The music is pretty good, though, and it fits the atmosphere of the game quite well.

Is this the next iDracula?  Probably not.  However, it is a really fun game, and I like the retro sci-fi theme.  The visuals are nice, the music is upbeat, and the multiple control schemes do their best to reach the widest range of players.  If you’re any sort of dual stick shooter fan you owe it to yourself to take Daisy Mae for a spin, and if you’ve been put off by this style of game play in the past due to controls, this might be one to change your mind.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Matched 'Em All

If you didn’t gather by the paragraph above, Twice is the iPhone version of matching. There have certainly been other implementations of matching on the iPhone, but I was keeping my fingers crossed that Herocraft might do something with it to at least intrigue me, if not actually blow me away. Instead, what I ended up with was a variant of matching that while mildly entertaining, doesn’t break new ground in such a way as to capture my attention. Twice has three game modes: sly, agile and smart. In Sly mode you must make matches in as few moves as possible. Each move reduces a turn indicator by one, and when that turn indicator is empty you lose a life. In Agile mode you must make all your matches in a certain amount of time. When the time is up, you lose a life. Finally, smart mode requires you to score the highest amount of points possible. Time doesn’t play a factor in this mode, but your points are determined by how many moves you make, so it’s kind of like an advanced version of Sly.

Playing the game is a simple matter of tapping on two tiles in a row. When tiles match they’ll stay turned over. If you’re feeling ambitious you can really tap on as many tiles in a row as you can get in before they start turning back over, but you need to keep track mentally of the sequence in which you tapped on tiles. I wouldn’t recommend tapping more than two ahead of schedule. Besides having three different modes, the developers were kind enough to not use the standard NxN board layout. In fact, so far every board of each level has been different. A lot of times the layouts actually seem to look like specific objects, which is also pretty cool. There’s even this neat thing where every once in a while a butterfly escapes when you turn a tile over, and while the butterfly is flittering around none of the bad effects take place. So if you’re playing timed mode, for example, you won’t lose any time while the butterfly is out. The sad part is that seems to be about the extent of features that stray from the norm. It keeps the game interesting for a while, but in the end it still feels like “just another matching game”.

While not the best visuals Herocraft has to offer, I do like the look of the game. The jungle theme works well, and there are nice little touches like the butterfly flitting around or the fireworks that shoot off at the end of each level. The sound effects are actually pretty week. The music is decent, but doesn’t seem to fit the theme of the game all that well.

Twice certainly isn’t a bad game, and in fact I’d say it’s probably one of the better matching games I’ve played on my iPod. Unfortunately, as someone who is not a fan of the genre in the first place, I was really hoping the game would do something to ignite that spark of interest in me, and Twice really didn’t do that. If you’re into matching games, I would suggest giving this one a try. You’ll probably like it a lot. If you’ve not tried matching games before, this might be a good place to start. If you’re like me and don’t really care for the genre, this isn’t going to push you over the edge.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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You play the title character, Hellkid, and in all fairness I guess you’re not really trying to escape Hell, or at least not as your primary goal.  You actually want to know what it’s like to be human, and you figure out that to do so you’ll need to gather souls of humans that have passed on into the underworld.  As luck would have it these souls appear in randomly generated patterns that hover above randomly generated landscapes filled with tall towers and wide gaps.  Your character is constantly in motion, so you don’t have to worry about that part of it.  All you have to do is tap once to jump over a gap, and tap and hold while jumping to grab onto a tower and swing.  When he reaches the apex of his swing he’ll let go, but if you’re not near solid ground yet you’ll need to try and grab another tower before you fall into a pit.  Along the way you can collect blue and orange souls, and you get more points the more you can collect in a row without missing one.

Reed Richards, I'm Comin' For Ya

On the down side, that’s really all there is to the game.  You can earn achievements along the way, but even that was a bit disappointing because they chose to use their own system instead of one of the already established ones.  I personally think this would have been a good candidate for OpenFeint.  Anyway, getting back to the game itself, some obstacles would have been nice.  Things to jump over or duck under would have added a bit of needed variety to the game.  Also, in the splash screen there’s a cool looking 3-headed dog, so why not have a sequence where that dog is chasing you?  I have nothing against simple, especially in this case where simple is still pretty addicting.  However, I want just a little bit more, and I know this developer knows how to give it.  Maybe an update down the road will see a few extra things added in.

Visually Hellkid is pretty sweet, but I wouldn’t have expected anything less.  The main character is cool looking and nicely animated, and has just a slight resemblance to a certain other red denizen of Hell with a bad attitude that smokes a cigar (and no, I’m not talking about a blushing Guerrilla Bob).  The background is sharp and nicely detailed, but sadly they didn’t give a distinct look to each of the two levels.  There are even birds flying around in the background, which is both neat and odd at the same time.  The sound effects are kind of dull, consisting mostly of a bubble-popping type sound when you collect a soul.  There’s a whistle when you collect a whole group of orange souls, and the maniacal laughter of your adversary can be heard when you fall into a pit.  I like the music, though it can get a bit repetitive after a while.  Of course, you really won’t be spending much of your time focusing on the music.

Hellkid certainly isn’t the first kid on this genre’s block, and it may not bring anything new to the game, but it’s still quite addictive.  The atmosphere is cool, the character is great, and it’s kind of Reed Richards-ish watching him stretch his arm out to grab a tower.  I hope they consider some of the suggestions I’ve made to the game play, but even if the game stays as is I can see myself spending a decent amount of time in Hellkid’s world.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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Every Friday,  www.appdope.com also gives away promotional codes to various software titles. According to Morgan, they currently have available over 50 promotional codes to giveaway. Anyone that owns an iPhone or iPod Touch should check out APPDOPE on a regular basis and especially on Fridays. You will need to register an account on APPDOPE and follow the links associated with the giveaway apps to qualify for the promo giveaways. I would suggest you go to www.appdope.com to get the whole story and enjoy what this great website has to offer.

APPDOPE is a great addition to the Apple iPhone community and should be one website that you have to bookmark. What APPDOPE offers via their MEGACOMP Fridays giveaway is one simple way of trying to secure one of the limited promotional codes developers have available to giveaway at the launch of any new title.

Final Verdict: Recommended

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Look At The Big Infantry

As with most scrolling shooters, the idea is to get from point A to point B, blasting everything in site. iGuardian has no story holding things together, so you don’t have to worry about that aspect of it. Unfortunately, there’s not much to the game as a whole. You start the game by selecting a mission (if you’ve never played you get mission 1, but any mission that you’ve started is available any time you come back to the game). You then select from one of three ships: a helicopter, a jet fighter and a Hellcat. Each is ranked according to speed, firepower and armor, and these attributes do seem to make at least some difference in how the game plays out, so choose the one that best fits your skills. Then it’s time to start shooting away until you either complete the level or get killed. You have but one life to live; you can collect health packs to refill your life bar, but once it’s empty the game is over.

Honestly, there’s nothing about the game that’s really all that inspired. Your adversaries are typical: tanks, planes, helicopters, rocket launcher infantry, etc. There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before. The level layouts are pretty bland as well, without even having the benefit of many if any “waves” of aerial attackers. The main tactic employed here is the usual “fire so many bullets that there’s no place to dodge” method of eliminating the player. Add to that some excessive use of guns that shoot lasers across the entire width of the screen, and you find yourself in the annoying position of “not if, but when” in terms of getting hit. The worst part is, this is on the easiest setting! You have a health meter that slowly depletes when you get hit, and you can pick up items to replenish that health. You only have one actual life, however, so when that meter is fully depleted it’s game over. There are 5 levels, and I’ve somehow managed to squeak by to level 3 three, but at this point I don’t really have the urge to try and press on any further.

The visuals aren’t bad, and are actually part of what attracted me to the game in the first place. In console terms I’d say they fall somewhere between the NES and SNES, or from a PC perspective maybe late 80’s shareware. The detail level is decent, though the objects aren’t big enough for too much detail. The color palette seems to lean heavily on the side of greens and browns, but the overall look of the game makes it work. It does kind of crack me up that the rocket launcher guys are like half the size of your plane, but I guess scaling them appropriately wouldn’t have worked too well visually. The sound effects are pretty haphazard, with a lot of things making no noise at all and most everything else sounding pretty much the same. The music is okay for a few seconds, but listening to it for any length of time gets pretty grating.

I wish I could say with any confidence that this is another vertical shooter worthy of adding to your collection. Unfortunately, with seasoned titles like iFighter, Skysmash 1918 and Skyforce Reloaded, as well as some fresh blood such as Eveningstar, there’s not a lot to recommend about iGuardian. The game play is pretty basic, the visuals are just average, and the sound is quite lacking. If you’re feeling the need to blow up some enemy aircraft, I highly suggest one of the other titles I’ve mentioned instead.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
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You play a prison guard that must battle hordes of dead inmates that have risen for no particular reason. The first thing to note is that there aren’t actually any live prisoners in this dungeon, which makes you wonder what they needed a prison guard for in the first place. That aside, you can choose between the Dungeon, Graveyard and Torture levels, and off you go. For me it doesn’t really matter which I choose, because it doesn’t take too many encounters before I die. Weapons and ammo seem pretty limited, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it adds to the challenge. However, it often seems like despite the fact that I have the crosshairs dead center on my target, I’m not actually hitting them when I fire. It also feels like I need to be up close for my weapon to be effective (even though guns should be ranged weapons), and naturally when I’m up close it’s easy for them to hit me as well.

You have a life meter that slowly drains when you get hit, and when it’s empty the game is over. I have not to this point run into any healing packs of any sort, but then I really haven’t gotten very far in any of the levels. The levels themselves are pretty standard fare in terms of design, and there’s nothing like keys to look for or chests to open or anything like that. There are gems to collect, though since I’ve yet to finish a level I don’t really know what the gems do. You also pick up various weapons while you’re traveling. So far I’ve found three different weapons besides the one I start with, but I’ve never found any extra ammo for the weapons. There’s an ammo meter below your health meter, and when that runs out it’s time to either find a new weapon or switch to a different one you have that isn’t empty. As for villains in the game, I’ve encountered two so far: skeletons and what appear to be enchanted pieces of armor. There are some variations in the types of weapons they use, but otherwise it’s basically two enemies. Hopefully there are more to come as you progress, but at the moment there’s nothing compelling me to put that much effort into uncovering them.

Dead Man Walking

Moving around in Dead Man’s Dungeon is a combination of tilt control and a virtual on-screen control. Tilting allows you to look around your environment. The virtual control allows you to actually move and comes in two flavors: swipe pad and d-pad. The d-pad works fairly well, though it seems a bit sluggish on the default settings. The swipe pad doesn’t seem to do anything at all. There are horizontal and vertical sensitivity controls, and while adjusting those made the game feel a bit less sluggish, it also made your character jittery. To fire your weapon you use the trigger in the bottom right corner of the screen, and there is a swipe control above that to switch weapons should you have more than one. Firing seemed pretty responsive, but the accuracy was fairly abysmal, even with a crosshairs.

The game isn’t terrible visually, but I would hardly describe it as having “gorgeous 3D graphics” either. The backgrounds are okay, but their attempt at using a dreary color palette to make everything look dark and ominous really just makes things look drab and muddled. There are some nice details in the surroundings, but you usually can’t tell until you’re up too close to care. The creatures themselves look decent, but they have that “3D starter pack” feel to them. Effects for things like getting hit and shooting monsters are rudimentary at best, and the blood spurts when you get struck don’t look very good at all. The sound is okay when you can hear it, but the creatures make no noise when moving and often don’t make any sounds when being hit. The weapons sound pretty much like you’d expect guns to sound. There is music while the levels are loading, but I don’t ever seem to hear any music while I’m actually playing the game.

I was really hoping to enjoy Dead Man’s Dungeon. Unfortunately, the game just never clicked for me. Usually the controls are the worst part of an FPS in my experience, but for Dead Man’s Dungeon they were really the highlight. The game play is sub-par, the graphics are just average, and the sound is intermittent. Given recent titles like Modern Combat, Eliminate and N.O.V.A., we know what the iPhone is capable of for the FPS genre, and Dead Man’s Dungeon doesn’t really make the grade.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

You are something that can only be described as the illegitimate brother of the gingerbread man, and your job is to defend the Earth from hordes of attacking alien robots.  To do this you must chuck watermelon peels at them and send them back to the moon, which is apparently where they came from?  At this point I’m sure you think I’m making this up.  Believe me, in some ways I wish I was.  This is one of those games where you saw the screen shots in the back of one of your video game magazines, decided it was too weird to bother with, and then years later regretted not playing as you dig up review after review on the internet with nothing but positive things to say about the game.

The game has 12 levels, and each level is comprised of multiple sections.  The aliens appear at the back of the screen facing you, and your character is in the foreground facing the aliens.  You tilt the device to move your character left and right and press anywhere on the screen except the pause button to throw a watermelon peel.  Ideally you want to hit the robots with the peels, but if you time it right you can get them to slip on the peels as well, which will also hurt them.  Don’t expect to take them down without a fight, however.

Don't Be Nervous

The aliens come in several different shapes and sizes, and each one has a unique method of attack.  You have a health bar that goes down every time you get hit by one of the aliens’ projectiles, and when the bar is empty your game is over.  Thankfully you get the option to pick up at the beginning of the last level you played (minus your score, of course).  There is one alien that blows you heart kisses instead of bullets, and catching those hearts allows you to regain some of your health.  The game has no power ups to speak of, and it honestly doesn’t really need it.

The graphics are simple in the sense that they lack fine details, but they still look really good.  The characters are all well animated, and the special effects when an alien preps to attack you are pretty sweet.  The main character is hysterical.  After he throws a watermelon peel he’ll turn towards you and chatter his mouth (I’m not sure he has any teeth) in anticipation of hitting something.  When he sends an alien to the moon he’ll turn towards you with a big grin on his face and giggle.  Tears will even stream down his eyes when he finally loses all his life, which would be a lot sadder if he weren’t so silly looking in the first place.

The sound effects are great.  From the popping noise when you toss a watermelon peel to the smack of the alien blowing you a kiss, half the noises don’t make sense but they all seem to work towards the greater good.  The main character steals the show, though, whether he’s giggling after sending an alien to the moon or doing his weird “I’ve never kissed a girl” noises when he catches a heart kiss.  The music is wonderfully 8-bit, and I chuckle to myself every time a chorus of the word “watermelon” chimes in.

I’m not quite sure what you’d classify this game as, though I suppose it’s sufficient to label it as a simple action game.  Whatever the case, it’s simple to pick up, hard to master, and a blast to watch and listen to.  If the somewhat odd artwork is what’s keeping you from trying the game out, make that your reason for actually trying the game in the first place.  You won’t regret it.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

• Total distance travelled
• Total time taken
• Average speed for the trip
• Waypoints to determine actual route taken

Now, with the BT-Q1000eX GPS, you can get even deeper into the complete trip analysis. The BT-Q1000eX GPS records at a blistering speed of up to 5 times per seconds. This means, you can determine intermediate speeds in situations where precise details are required. This is really handy for racing enthusiasts and experts. Precise measuring of speeds throughout the whole trip or lap in not new but the ability to have this at a pricepoint under $200.00 is very impressive. The ability to know the speed before entering the corner or exiting the corner can be readily seen afterwards for automobile racers. This technology is beneficial for any racer that actually runs through a course with numerous twists and turns. Typically standard GPS loggers record anywhere from around 5 seconds to 1 minute. This is fine for short or long distance recording to determine point A to B tracking but not so good in determining intermediate details. A speeding race car can enter and exit a turn in under 5 seconds thus making precise calculations about speed for a given spot on the track very difficult with standard GPS devices. The BT-Q1000eX GPS will record up to 5 times a second therefore about 25 points of data can be recorded within a 5 second stretch of race track.

With this high speed recording capability, you now have the ability to track:

• Average/minimum/maximum speed per lap
• Sector time (the time from one split point to another)
• Split time (the cumulative time from start point to split point)
• Speed for any given position.

Just like many of the QSTARZ GPS units, it is a simple one button ON unit and requires no additional hardware to reord the data. Once the data has been recorded, you can download the data via USB or Bluetooth. The BT-Q1000eX GPS comes with Lap Time Analysis, QSports software and QTravel software.

The BT-Q1000eX GPS has a suggested retail pricing of $160.00 USD. You can find more details at QSTARZ.

Source: QSTARZ

Hit A Glowing Cylinder

If you’re not actually familiar with the game, it goes something like this: each game consists of tossing 9 balls down a slope towards the playing field.  The playing field has several open-ended cones on it, each one representing a certain point value.  Points go from 10 to 50 in increments of 10, and then there are 2 100 point cylinders in the upper corners of the playing field.  As long as you get the ball within the playing field (there is a gutter) you’ll score at least 10 points.  You can also build up bonus multipliers as you play.  Finally, from time to time one of the cylinders will glow, and you can earn even more points if you hit that cylinder when it’s glowing.  Overall the objective is to score as many points as you can, because the more points you get, the more tickets you earn.

So what do you do with these tickets?  Well, just like in a normal arcade, you can redeem them for prizes!  I’m not exactly sure how the whole prize thing works, as I’m fairly new to the game myself, but I’d wager to bet that from time to time the prize selection refreshes as long as you have some sort of internet connection (or there may be a variety of prizes built into the game, who knows?)  Either way the prizes are the types of things you’d expect to find in your local arcade, ranging from a sucker for 13 tickets to the coveted robotic dog for 12,000 tickets.  Yep, you read that right.  Better be ready to get a lot of games in!

Controlling your throws is quite simple.  You can either swipe your finger on the screen in the direction you want to toss the ball, or you can place your finger on the screen and flick the device to throw it.  Personally, I prefer the swipe method.  Once the ball is in the air you can tilt your device to somewhat affect the path of the ball.  I think they did a really good job with the physics in Skee-ball.  The 100 point cylinders are hard to get as they should be, and the ball has this eerily realistic habit of hitting the 50 point cylinder and rolling its way down to the 20 instead of going in like this misguided waving of your hands is instructing it to.  All this game is missing is that annoying little kid that reaches over and grabs the tickets out of your dispenser when you’re in the middle of playing a game.

The graphics are nothing awe inspiring, but that being said, they’ve done a very nice job of recreating an authentic looking skee-ball machine in 3D.  I really like the slow mo effect on the final throw of a game.  The prizes are cute and cheap looking when appropriate, just as you’d expect for prizes that you can win at an arcade.  From the initial noise of the balls being dispensed to the rolling of a ball up the playing field, it sounds just like the skee-ball experience you remember as a kid.  It would be cool if there were some background chatter from all those annoying folks that used to stand right behind you and bother you, but I guess that would be a little too realistic.  There’s no music, but I was honestly getting so into the game that I didn’t really care.

I loaded up this game with the intention of playing one or two rounds so that I could say I tried it and delete it from my device to make room for some other games I need to review.  Now it’s an hour later, I’ve written a review of the game, and I’m trying to figure out which game to remove from my “permanents” page to make a place for this one.  Who knew something as simple as a skee-ball game could be so addicting?  I’m usually not such a big fan of electronic versions of these old fashioned arcade experiences, but this one has got me hooked.  If you haven’t yet taken the plunge, get yourself a copy of Skee-ball.  It’s great casual fun, and good for the whole family.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

Starball is a simple game in premise. You must roam the screen as long as you can, collecting objects and avoiding bad guys. From time to time a power up will pop up as well. You simply run over it to pick it up, and depending on what it is the effect will be instantaneous or on a timer. If you have a power up that has a duration to it and you run into another power up, your first one will go away. My favorite power up is invincibility, not only because you’re temporarily invulnerable but because you can also destroy enemies during that time. My least favorite power up is clairvoyance, which simply shows the path of each enemy. I guess it’s supposed to help you dodge better, but personally I find it kind of useless.

Who do-do the doo-doo?

Controlling the game is a simple matter of tilting the device. Power ups are automatically activated when you run over them, so there’s nothing to worry about there. The game has three difficulty levels – easy, normal and insane. In easy mode you get a new enemy for every two objects you collect, in normal mode it’s a new villain for each object, and in insane mode you get two bad guys for each object you collect. You score a point for each object you pick up, and the game is over the first time you collide with an enemy without any protection. There are three different themes to choose from which are really more of a visual preference than anything. However, what I did find a bit disappointing was that high scores were kept not only by difficulty (which is to be expected) but also by theme. I think the latter was a bit unnecessary.

Like many games in this genre, the visuals are simple yet pleasing. There’s some animation, and a couple of special effects here and there, but nothing really dazzling. It all just looks nice. The three themes to choose from are a plus as well. It’s kind of ironic, because I just got through criticizing the whole “doodle” style of art that’s cropping up in more and more games these days, yet I find myself oddly drawn to the doodle theme in this game. Please don’t tell anyone! The sound effects are okay, and the music is good in short bursts, but it would have been nice if the audio was a part of the themes instead of having the same sound regardless of which theme you chose.

The biggest thing absent from Starball right now is achievements, but hopefully that’s part of the plan for having OpenFeint integration. Also, while I don’t mind the current themes at all, I hope there are considerations for additional ones over time. That aside, this is one slick little game that certainly lives up to its claim of “simply addicting”. Score another victory on the side of casual pick up and play gaming.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

In Championship Bowling you can play either Ten Pin or Strikes-In-A-Row.  Ten Pin is your standard game of bowling.  You can have up to four players, but they are all human controlled in a hot-seat format, so there’s no way to compete against anyone if you’re by yourself.  This mode is in dire need of a computer opponent.  In Strikes-In-A-Row you are trying to see how many strikes you can get.  You get three opportunities to not get a strike, and then it is game over.  I’m not very good at this mode, but I think I could actually get into it.  However, every time you lose you have to select “play again”, go through the high score tables, and then select the mode from the main menu again.  This really kills the urge to play when you’re not very good, because you spend more time setting up the game than actually playing it.

No matter which mode you choose you can select the ball you want to use from a few different colors and weights between 6 and 16 lbs.  In Ten Pin mode you can also select between two different lanes.  The only real difference in the lanes that I can tell is aesthetic.  To control the ball you swipe left and right for positioning, and then swipe up to throw the ball.  The swipe sets the initial direction and speed of the throw, and then you can tilt the device to implement a spin.  Sometimes I had trouble getting it to register that I wanted to change my starting position, but otherwise the controls seemed to handle pretty well.  At the very least I wish they’d add a computer opponent, but the truth is that the game really needs something to stand out from other bowling games.

The visuals are nice, but nothing overly special.  Since you’re always focused in on your lane there’s not much difference between the two choices visually.  It would be nice if the game would at least start with a pan around the joint so you could see some things to make one place feel different than the other.  The sound effects make you feel like you’re really in a bowling alley, and the addition of the desk clerk coming over the PA every once in a while was a nice touch.  This is where the main difference between the two lanes comes in, as one voiceover is a lady and the other is a man (or a lady with a bad chest cold, I guess).  The music is decent, and at least there’s a different track for each lane.  The Starlite lanes music reminds me a lot of the music from Bowling For Burgers.

Overall Ten Pin Championship Bowling is a nice, solid implementation of the game of bowling for the iPhone.  Unfortunately, with the exception of Strikes-In-A-Row, it doesn’t really go beyond just being average.  If you happen to hang around a lot with people that would rather bowl electronically than go to a real lane, you might get some use out of the hot-seat 4 player mode.  If you’re really wanting something a little different from your iPhone bowling experience, however, you really need to look elsewhere.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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[All About Quick Looks]

Joe is the modern Miner 2049er, running around a series of tunnels trying to collect all the gold he can find.  Each level contains a certain amount of gold, and you must claim it all to unlock the door to the next level.  Besides the basic ability to jump, you can throw rocks at your opponents or blow them up with sticks of dynamite.  You can also duck to avoid some certain unwieldy hillbillies shooting at you from garbage barrels.  Speaking of which, there is definitely an interesting variety of critters in these mines.  About the only “standard” bad guy is the bat.  Then you have the aforementioned hillbillies, along with caveman like creatures and various hostile shellfish.  There may be other creepy crawlies as you progress through the game, but this is what I’ve encountered so far.

You swipe to left and right to move accordingly, and up to jump.  Separately these work pretty good, but sometimes it can be hard to move and jump at the same time, which can cause problems when you’re trying to do something like jump off a platform.  You swipe down to duck or climb down a ladder.  To throw rocks you simply tap the screen repeatedly.  This also works pretty well, though there are times when it’s hard to tweak the position of Joe just right so you can hit something.  The biggest issue is with setting dynamite.  The instructions say to tap the screen in one spot for a couple of seconds, but quite often it seemed like I was unable to set the dynamite.  This of course would become a problem when I had a group of cavemen headed towards me, for example.

Something else I didn’t really care for was the lack of a multi-tiered scoring system.  There are lots of things to pick up to get extra points, but since you simply either beat a level or you don’t, there’s no real impetus to go back and play the levels again like there is in most other Donut Games offerings.  It also seemed a bit odd that “bonus” levels had to be completed before you could go on.  To me bonus levels should be optional.  But then, that’s just me.

The graphics certainly have the feel of a Donut Games product.  However, they just seem so small.  There are some nice little details, however, like the wisp of smoke that rises when a box (or you) get consumed by one of the many fires littered about the mines.  Did I mention that everything just seems so small?  The sound effects are all right, though a couple things like whatever the hillbilly utters when he pops up and Joe say “Yeah, some dynamite” crack me up.  The music is pretty good, and there are at least two or three different tunes that get rotated among the levels.

As I do most of the time, I continued to play Gold Miner Joe while I was writing this review, and I must admit that it’s started to grow on me a little bit.  I still don’t think it’s up to Donut Games standards, but I appreciate it more than when I started.  Still, a less than natural control scheme, lack of incentive to replay levels, and the general smallness of the visuals are somewhat disappointing.  As such, I find myself for the first time unable to give a Donut Games game a Recommended rating.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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[All About Quick Looks]

I love shooters, so I thought Retro Fighter would be worth looking into. It certainly has some nice elements to it. Each level is organized quite differently from the last.  The first level is just a bunch of ships haphazardly coming towards you, where level two offers a repeated bashing from large groups of ships attacking you at the same time. The game really turns everything on its head in level three when it shifts to an asteroids type scenario where ships are coming at you in 360 degrees. Unfortunately, that’s when the controls and visuals start to show their weakness.

You drag your finger to move the ship, and tap two fingers to unleash a super bomb. Standard firing is handled automatically so you can concentrate on flying. Unfortunately, when you get in the 360 degree level your hand starts to get in the way of your view as you try and guide the ship all around the screen. The type of control scheme Retro Fighter employs works much better when your ship stays at the bottom of the screen. That’s too bad, because conceptually the 360 degree level was the most interesting.

There are several power ups to be acquired throughout the game. Clone and region bombs are used immediately, while super bombs are triggered by tapping two fingers on the screen simultaneously. The only problem with that move is that it leaves you temporarily flightless, which isn’t a problem if you actually happen to fire the bomb. However, if you don’t quite pull of the move you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to your opponents for a second or two, which is all it takes to die. Other power ups include enhancements to your standard firing capability as well as a temporary shield. You get three lives to make it as far as you can. I’m not sure if you can earn extra lives, because I haven’t so far. However, this is quite the causal fighter in the sense that you can continue infinitely, so getting a bunch of extra lives really doesn’t matter.

Visually Retro Fighter actually looks pretty good – until you start blasting everything up, that is. The ships are just simple geometric designs, and that actually works well against the grid background. The background even warps as you move across it, which is a nice effect. However, when you start destroying ships the ensuing explosions look like confetti, and it doesn’t take long to clutter the screen. The problem with this is that some objects are hard to see with all this clutter, and I would often find myself dying without even knowing what hit me. This is only compounded by the whole “finger in the way” issue. The sound effects are pretty standard fare, and actually can get a bit tedious. The game really needs some music to offset that, and unfortunately there is none. I could see a nice 8-bit NES style soundtrack complimenting this game quite nicely.

I like Retro Fighter’s style, and I think there’s a lot of fun to be had here. I just wish there were a way to turn off some of the “sparkle”. Also, while I don’t know how to correct it short of implementing another control scheme, there needs to be a less obtrusive way to handle the 360 degree levels. Retro Fighter is certainly worth a look if you’re a shooter fan, though.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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[All About Quick Looks]

The nice feature of this website is that you are able to attach drawings and videos to your blog comments to convey your ultimate design concept. ASUS is also giving away a FREE laptop every 2 months to one lucky person who answers questions and provids some insightful feedback. 

This is your chance to get your name in lights and show the world that you have the creative talent to come up with the next ultimate laptop design or feature.

You can go HERE to check out the contest.

The basic premise is that you have items falling from the sky, and you must use your mathematical skills to destroy them before they reach the bottom of the screen and harm you. There are 4 overarching categories which include Counting, Arithmetic, Algebra and Base Conversion. You can choose to play strictly within one of these categories, or you can opt for Classic mode which walks you through all of them. My personal favorite so far is Algebra, mainly because even on hard Counting and Arithmetic are too easy, and quite frankly I don’t remember much of my base conversion lessons. Therein lies the main caveat with Digit Defenders – if you don’t already have a grasp of the various concepts, this isn’t going to teach them to you. Instead, it’s really a tool to help you get better at what you already know.

In Counting groups of objects fall from the sky, and you just have to enter a number indicating how many objects are in a given group. Arithmetic provides you with basic math problems ranging from simple addition and subtraction to equations that have multiple operations in them. Once you get to Algebra they start throwing in variables. I did run into a problem in this category because I couldn’t find a way to enter multiple values in for a single equation, which meant I could never solve anything. With Base Conversion you start by providing the decimal equivalent of binary numbers. To “attack” you simply type the answer to a given problem in the numeric keyboard at the bottom of the screen. There are buttons for deleting one character as well as for completely clearing your entry, a button for adding a negative in front of an answer, and a button on either side of the keyboard for firing. The buttons are easy to hit and were always responsive.

The graphics are nothing fancy, but they serve their purpose. For the Counting category you’ll get pictures of various objects, and for the rest of the categories you’ll just see numbers (and letters where variables are used). When you successfully “shoot” an object it will wobble and fade away, though there is no bullet or laser effect. That would have been a nice little touch. The sound effects are fairly basic like the visuals. However, when you shoot an group in the Counting category they did a pretty good job of making the sound reflect whatever object is in that group. There is no background music, which is good or bad depending on your ability to concentrate. Some music with the option to turn it off would have been nice.

Digit Defenders definitely has some good points. There is a nice variety of problems to solve, and the overall presentation is decent and accessible. It could certainly use a little more flash to keep certain audiences interested, but the aesthetics are not the worst out there by far. My biggest gripe is the issue with not being able to enter multiple values for equations with more than one variable, effectively making the Algebra category unplayable after a certain point. I also think this has a bit more limited market than many educational apps because it simply reinforces rather than teaching. Of course, that’s really a matter of what you’re looking for in a math tool.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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[All About Quick Looks]

The game is quite simple. You start by picking between 10, 20 and 50 rounds (personally, I can’t see going 50 rounds, but whatever works for you). In each round you are presented with a zoomed in picture of either an imp or an oaf. All you have to do is press the Imp button if you think it’s an imp, or the Oaf button… well, you get the idea. If you’re really not sure which to pick you can tap the picture to zoom out a little. Be cautious when you use this feature, though. You start out with 100 points for a round, and each time you tap the screen you lose 20 points. If your points for a round go to zero the answer is revealed and you move to the next round. You also don’t score anything for guessing wrong, though you don’t lose any points on your overall score, either. If, however, you can guess correctly multiple times without using any hints you’ll gain bonus points.

That’s all there is to it. The help gives you some tips on how to identify an oaf or an imp, but really your left to the whim of the initial placement of your view to determine if you’ll get the 100 points or not. If the part of the image you see is mostly clothes or dead space, it will be hard to determine anything without zooming. That aside, I think the game could be a lot more interesting if they made it more socially interactive. First, throw in some achievements and put it on OpenFeint. Then, give me the ability to brag about my high scores and how I can tell the difference between imps and oafs on Twitter. Finally, put in a two player hot seat (or even wi-fi) mode to see who can get the higher score. All these things could make this game more appealing to an older crowd. Even without any of those enhancements I think the kids will get a kick out of this game.

The visuals have a very interesting style to them. They look like they’ve been drawn in chalk by a very talented child. I actually think it’s a neat style, and I look forward to seeing more of this in their next game (though the actual characters will be much more detailed to reflect the nature of that game, of course). There are some quirky sound effects, along with comments from time to time pointing out that you thought the picture was of an imp or an oaf. I absolutely love the music – but I’m not talking about the in-game music. That’s good too, especially since there seems to be a nice variety of tunes throughout the rounds. What really sticks out is the main theme, which is some twisted amalgamation of Andy Griffith and Brady Bunch background music, and the help theme. Yes, there’s music specifically for the help screen, and it cracks me up every time I listen to it.

If you have kids, Imp Or Oaf? will probably keep them entertained for some time. If you’re just a kid at heart, this might not quite do it for you. This is one of those tough situations where I should try to look at it from the perspective of the target audience, but the only experience I have to drawn on in regards to playing it is my own. It’s a nice game, but it just wasn’t for me. As a result…

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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[All About Quick Looks]

So what’s this game all about?  Basically you have a bunch of houses (or gas pumps if you play with the Oil Tycoon skin) that need gas.  Each level has one or more gas tanks with one or more outlets.  There is also a bunch of pipe lying around just waiting to connect the houses to the gas tanks.  Your job is to connect all the houses to all of the gas tanks using the available pipe.  Once all of the piping has been used and everything is connected (houses will light up and gas pumps will lose their closed sign) you win the level.  There’s no timer, so it pays to study the level carefully, as the number of moves can make a difference in your score.  Also, you have to keep in mind that unlike most games of this type, connections can be made “off screen” (for example, a pipe on the left edge of the screen can connect to a house on the right edge).

Rotating pieces is a simple mater of clicking objects on the screen.  You must always be conscious of the direction of rotation, however.  This can be changed by pressing a button in the lower right corner of the screen.  As you make moves you’ll notice your move counter going up and your score bar going down.  To an extent this is okay.  Each move you make initially deducts from your score.  However, if you finish the level in the allowed number of moves (indicated by the Best Score number in the upper right corner of the screen) you’ll still get the maximum score possible.  All together there are five level packs, so there should be enough to keep you busy for a while.

The graphics are simple but they get the job done.  There are three skins – default, oil tycoon and winter.  Oil Tycoon is probably the “fanciest”, where the houses get replaced with gas pumps that have a closed sign on them until they’re connected up.  Sound effects are limited to a click every time you rotate a tile and a trumpet sound once you’ve completed a level.  There is no background music, which naturally is a lot more noticeable in a slower paced game such as this one.  At least you can listen to something in your iTunes library as long as you start the music before launching the game.

Gas Tycoon is a low key implementation of the classic “pipes” genre that doesn’t break any new ground but handles itself quite nicely.  The ability to build paths that wrap around the screen is cool, as is the score being based on the ability to keep from making unnecessary rotations.  With a game like this I think it really boils down to which implementation you like better, and for me Gas Tycoon is one of the best I’ve played on the portable screen.  I’m looking forward to seeing what Gas Tycoon 2 has to offer.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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