iPhone App Reviews

Q&F: Christmas App Roundup, Part 2

Michael (Admin) | Nov 28, 2008 Games, Quick & Free

User rating: (2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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Christmas Rock’n'Roll is the lite holiday version of Tag Games Limited’s Rock’n'Roll app. Your job is to guide a psychotic-looking thing named “Roll” through a series of mazes where he needs to collect musical notes and ultimately rescue his buddy “Rock” who has been kidnapped by an evil Christmas-hating bastard.

Maze navigation is done by rotating the map with finger movements along the edge of the iPhone screen and tilting will also affect Roll’s movement. It’s hard at first, but if you play enough you’ll get the hang of it.

Despite being very colorful and Christmasy, I wonder if Christmas Rock’n'Roll will do more to piss your kids off than entertain them. It’s a high-quality game but, between the semi-difficult controls and the big maps filled with obstacles and bad guys, this app might be better suited for grownups and older children who can focus their attention for more than 30 seconds at a time… aww what the hell, let the kids play it. Tell them they HAVE TO rescue Rock or Santa won’t be coming this year! That’ll shut them up.

The full, non-themed Rock’n'Roll is $1.99.

My eyes would be bugging out too if I were stuck in this frozen-hell of a maze

Trivial Memory Christmas is your standard photo-matching game. Tap squares on a board to reveal images and find pairs.

Overall this app’s pretty good. It has a two-player option, three difficulty settings that produce photo grids laid out in 4×4, 6×6, and 8×8 formats, and it plays Christmas music which can be turned off. The game design isn’t the greatest, but hey whatever… it’s free, it’s mildly entertaining, and you’ll probably be deleting it on December 26th. Get it if you like this kind of game.

Trivial Technology also sells the non-themed Trivial Memory for $.99.

This game isn't pretty, but it's very playable

Xmas-a-Mass Free is the very “lite” version of Xmas-a-Mass which Powerhouse Games sells for $2.99.

It’s really a pretty cool game… hold your finger on the iPhone screen to produce a nicely wrapped gift that grows in size the longer you hold it. Let go of the gift before it touches one of the satanic goblins crowding the screen, and keep adding gifts until you clear the level. Meanwhile, an orchestra plays a Christmas showtune soundtrack in the background.

Lite apps are supposed to give you a chance to test-drive the real thing before you buy so, in that sense, I really shouldn’t bitch about Xmas-a-Mass Free… but it’s such a short trial of the game!! Five levels is probably enough for you to decide whether you like it or not, but come on man! Geeeezzz!!!!

Ok, I’m done ranting. It’s a good game, just be prepared for your free trial to end abruptly.

Christmas just isn't Christmas without evil goblin heads among your gifts

Tags: Christmas, free

Q&F: Christmas App Roundup, Part 1

Michael (Admin) | Nov 28, 2008 Entertainment, Quick & Free

User rating: (No Ratings Yet)

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The number of holiday apps in the iTunes App Store is growing by the second! I’ll be picking through them over the next week or three in a series of upcoming Q&F posts like this one. Here’s to hoping you have a nice, safe holiday season, and please remember that it’s very bad to trample Wal-Mart employees to death while you’re doing your shopping. OMG people are idiots.

Don’t you dare pay for a “Christmas Countdown” app! Get the ad-supported Sleeps to Christmas instead and throw the buck you would have spent into one of those red Salvation Army buckets.

Dardan Software, maker of Escape Pod and Alphonetic, apparently realized that a countdown-only app is a total waste of space so they were kind enough to throw some holiday jingles into Sleeps to Christmas. You can choose from eight different songs like Deck the Halls and White Christmas, and a quick tap on Santa’s sign will change it to show how many sleeps (days), hours, minutes, or seconds remain until a fat, bearded stranger breaks into your home through the chimney.

Sleeps to Christmas works as promised and the music is a nice touch, so if the kids haven’t learned to read a calendar yet this app will do a nice job of telling them what they want to know.

Sweet, Christmas is just a 627-hour nap away

If you know the full lyrics to more than a couple of Christmas carols, you are a gigantic loser!! For the rest of us, Xmas Carols Lite provides the words to 20 songs including all of the most popular Christmas carols and several that I’ve never, ever heard of.

Xmas Carols Lite doesn’t play music, it just gives you the words. The developer, Dok LLC, says “we will be releasing a Christmas Caroling app with even more features soon” so I’m guessing you’ll have to buy it when it comes out if you want to do a full-on sing-a-long.

I think it’s nice that you can get all the lyrics to Christmas carols in one app, but if a bunch of Christmas carolers come to my door singing and holding iPhones I’m gonna turn the hose on them. Actually I think I’ll just turn the hose on ALL carolers, regardless of what they’re reading lyrics from. It’s gonna be hilarious!

This will come in handy when the inevitable "12 Days of Christmas" trivia question gets asked.

Christmas Sounds Free is an ad-supported collection of 16 Christmas sound effects. Press a button, play a sound. Press the same button again right away, and now the sound is playing over itself! Once a sound starts there’s no way to stop it, and I’m not sure if this is intentional (probably not) but it’s kind of entertaining.

If you just start pressing buttons all over the place it won’t be long until you’ll have produced your very own Christmas Symphony From Hell. Bonus points to KVapps for making the Santa recordings so amateurish that they’re borderline funny.

Kids will likely enjoy the hell out of this app, so you should definitely get it as long as you’re emotionally prepared for the endless holiday racket that will ensue. An ad-free version of this app can be had for $.99.

"Mommy, why does Santa sound like he's drunk?"

Tags: Christmas, free

Payday Roulette

Michael (Admin) | Nov 27, 2008 Games

User rating: (2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Happy Thanksgiving! In honor of this wonderful (American) holiday I’m reviewing a casino game. I’m pretty sure there’s an inappropriate joke to be inserted here, but I’m not interested in pissing anyone off so I’ll just let it go. Enjoy your turkey or tofurkey or whatever it is you’re gorging yourself on today.

I have received exactly one free pack of cigarettes in my lifetime, and it was while sitting at a roulette table at the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas. I had been parked there for a few hours and one of the casino hosts asked if he could get me anything, I said Marlboros, and *voila* a hot girl in a miniskirt served them up. Know why he was being so nice? Because I was playing roulette, the biggest sucker bet in the house! It’s worse than “the field” in craps, and it’s far worse than “insurance” in blackjack. I speak from experience… never, EVER play roulette for real money. But if you’re just dying for some wheel action, Payday Roulette is the way to go.

Veiled Games went all out with this app. The graphics are gorgeous, you can do nearly every bet possible on an actual roulette table, and the odds of winning are every bit as bad. In fact, I think the only bet you can do in Vegas that you can’t do in Payday Roulette is a 0/00 split, where you put down one bet that can win on either of those numbers.

If you’ve never played roulette before, Payday Roulette does come with some instructions and a sample table that shows you where you can place your chips. The instructions aren’t very detailed, but in playing you’ll at least get an idea of just how easy it is for this game to screw you out of your life savings. If you go to an actual casino and still need help understanding which bets pay what, the dealer (called a croupier in roulette terms) will be glad to fill you in. But don’t be fooled by the 35:1 payout on hitting a single number… the odds against hitting it are usually 37:1.

In the improvements department, it would be nice if there was an easier way to place insanely large bets instead of dragging individual chips to the same spot, and an option to play a single-0 wheel would be cool, too. However, the only flaw I really think Veiled Games must fix is that the game won’t let you listen to music while playing. The in-game sound is nice, but some people just wanna rock out while spinning the wheel.

The iTunes App Store has a few different roulette games and so far Payday Roulette is the only one I’ve played, but I think it’s safe to say that this would rank among the “best in class” for this particular casino game… if not THE best. Roulette isn’t a complicated game, and I have a hard time imagining anyone making a significantly better app than this one.

If you like roulette or are just too chicken to try the Russian version, Payday Roulette is totally worth $.99. If it convinces you to stay off the real roulette tables you might even argue that it’s saved you a small fortune.

Tags: $.99, casino

Q&F: iBowl

Michael (Admin) | Nov 25, 2008 Games, Quick & Free

User rating: (1 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)

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SGN seems to have carved out a nice little niche for itself in the wide world of try-not-to-chuck-your-iPhone-out-the-window sports. iGolf was kind of fun even though it definitely put you at risk for hurling your phone at innocent bystanders.

iBowl is more of the same, but it doesn’t require a broad golf swing so your precious iPhone is much safer with this one. My first attempts at “bowling” with this thing were met with complete failure until I figured out that you have to hold the Bowl button during your swing and then release it like you’d release an actual bowling ball. When you get that part down, which isn’t hard, this app is alright.

I like this game better than iGolf because you get to play a full game, you can play it while sitting down… and it doesn’t take much to send the ball down the lane. And therein lies the secret to successful iBowling. :cool:

I'm so much better at this than real bowling, probably because I don't iBowl when I'm drunk

Tags: free

Jigsawed Jigsaw Puzzle

Michael (Admin) | Nov 25, 2008 Games

User rating: (9 votes, average: 3.78 out of 5)

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Wow. Ephemeron Industries doesn’t screw around! They set out to make a kickass puzzle app, and that’s exactly what they did with Jigsawed. Anyone who thinks they can make a better jigsaw app should just give up because they can’t, and for once in my life I’m not trying to be a total smartass.

I reviewed Puzzoodle (Halloween) which is a really good jigsaw puzzle app in its own right, but Jigsawed Jigsaw Puzzle does it all. You can adjust the number of puzzle pieces from 9 (great for toddlers) to 144 (great for inmates), piece rotation can be toggled on/off, start blind if you’re hardcore and don’t want to see the completed puzzle first, and you even get to adjust how sensitive the pieces are to snapping in place.

As expected, Jigsawed provides help if you want it… peek at the image, solve some of the puzzle, or solve all of it if you’re a quitter. This application’s greatest feature, though, is how it gives you tons of ways to find photos for puzzling. From within the app you can choose from:

• 80 built-in puzzles
• Take a picture
• Camera Roll/Photo Library
• Flickr feeds
• National Geographic photo of the day
• NASA picture of the day

National Geographic and NASA photos aren’t just today’s photos… between the two categories there are about 170 images, plus there’s the 80 built-in puzzles, plus whatever’s on your camera roll, plus the endless pictures you can browse or search for in Flickr. Jigsawed can keep you busy forever. Literally.

Other features include the ability to select a random photo from a collection and the option to read whatever captions or text accompany the photo you’re piecing together.

If you’re jigsaw-crazy, Jigsawed is the app to get! Don’t question me. Just pay the dollar and be glad they’re not charging more.

Tags: $.99, puzzle, traditional

WallZ

Michael (Admin) | Nov 25, 2008 Games

User rating: (No Ratings Yet)

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WallZ has been in the iTunes App Store for close to six weeks and it only has ONE user review? Daaaaang. It may not be The World’s Greatest Game but it’s definitely better than the low review count would suggest, and kudos to Gamer Outfit for not recruiting a bunch of their idiot friends to post BS reviews. I hate when developers do that.

Your mission in WallZ is a familiar one if you’ve already played other puzzle games like reMovem and Cubes… tap like-colored pieces to make them disappear until you clear the board, and the more like-colored pieces you can tap at once (when they’re touching and form a chain, that is) the more points you get. The smallest combo you can tap is two bricks.

To make things interesting there are special pieces of this and that stuck in the wall, and of course you’ll be tempted to tap on them but sometimes it’s better to leave them alone. The coolest thing you’ll find is dynamite which blows up a part of the wall, so it’s best to use these pieces strategically as they could save your ass from failing to complete a level.

The only way to advance to the next level is by tapping away ALL of the bricks, and to do this you have to tilt your iPhone left and right so that the outer parts of the wall slide into view. Keep tapping and the wall gets narrower, but if you wind up with a single brick remaining the round will be declared a ‘stalemate’ and you have to start over.

Even though the basic concept behind WallZ is far from original, this game is fun and has a few things going for it. The dynamite is a great addition and so is the accelerometer wall movement, but what I like most is the way the bricks explode and send knights flying all over the place as they’re launched from their perches at the top of the wall! It’s somehow very satisfying to be causing all that destruction as you plow your way through the puzzles. Scores in WallZ are also pretty insane… my high score so far is 809,350 which is probably nothing compared to a true WallZ champ, but my fragile ego likes that way better than games where the scores are tiny.

Overall WallZ is a solid game and deserves a lot more respect than a single review in the App Store. The one things that’s glaringly absent is a global high score board, but hopefully that’ll be added later. This game is still worth paying a buck to get.

Tags: $.99, puzzle

Q&F: Turkey Hunt

Michael (Admin) | Nov 24, 2008 Games, Quick & Free

User rating: (2 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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Jirbo’s Turkey Hunt is Ghost Pop in disguise. Instead of tapping on ghosts like you did in their Halloween game, you’re tapping turkeys. Both games are completely identical but with different themes.

Yawn.

Still, if you need something to keep the kids out of your hair while you’re trying to cook an actual bird then it couldn’t hurt to download it. Keep your eyes peeled for the inevitable Santa Pop or Rudolph Hunt or whatever the hell they’re gonna call the Christmas version of this game.

And just for fun, here are some very insightful user reviews from the iTunes App Store:

This game is gayer than 2 men making out
- Unkwon person 123456789

If u like this app u r a buttwipe
- Koopa fart

I enjoyed this game about as much as a prison shower
- JCIV83

Slaughtering birds is fun for the whole family

Tags: free, Thanksgiving

Q&F: Cube

Michael (Admin) | Nov 24, 2008 Games, Quick & Free

User rating: (2 votes, average: 2.50 out of 5)

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There’s a reason Cube has only 2½ stars after 5000+ reviews: it’s practically unplayable! You have to admire fernLightning for attempting to put Quake on the iPhone, but this first-person-shooter isn’t even close to being ready for primetime.

When the graphics are running smoothly (usually when there’s nothing to shoot at) control is super difficult… accelerometer movement is way too sensitive and will probably make you hurl if you’re prone to motion sickness. Throw in some bad guys and you can expect the framerate to slow down to an excruciating crawl, and even if the game doesn’t go all laggy on you it’s still pretty much impossible to aim at anything.

Cube would be an impressive game if it weren’t such a pain in the ass to play. Until the movement and lag see some massive improvements, I’ll have to file this under “waste of time”.

This game looks cool in screenshots but trying to play it is pure torture

Tags: 3D, free

Voxie Pro Recorder & Dictation

Michael (Admin) | Nov 20, 2008 Business

User rating: (48 votes, average: 3.13 out of 5)

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As of today, Voxie is on sale for $1.99 – not sure what the regular price is (sorry!).

I have absolutely no need to record audio on my iPhone, but Voxie kind of makes me wish I did! Seriously, this app is that good… it’s like Bottle Rocket saw a market for voice-recording apps, decided they wanted to be King, and they reached out with two hands and seized the kingship by the nads.

It’s been a while since I had a modern digital recorder in my hand, but I have a hard time seeing any of those caveman devices outdoing Voxie in the features department. It lets you name your recordings and store them under customized categories, email small recordings to friends, flag them in a few different ways, resume recording long after the Stop button’s been pushed, and you can even choose the audio quality if your iPhone is low on disk space or you need to go for CD quality.

One of the greatest things about Voxie is its ability to transfer files to your computer without it being a huge pain in your ass. I tried to email a 5.1 mb file to myself (4 minutes at medium quality) and was promptly told that it was too big.

So how the hell do I get this thing off my phone?

From the screen that shows my list of recordings, which btw is cleverly designed to look and act just like the iPhone’s Visual Voicemail interface, I just pushed the Sync button. Voxie gave me an IP address to go to on my browser, and *voila* my files magically appeared in my web browser ready for download! F’in sweet.

Voxie also has a great Settings screen that lets you customize the app both functionally and aesthetically, and Bottle Rocket even had the foresight to build in a quick-record method called Express. Just launch Voxie, hit the Express button, and tap or shake to start recording. You can categorize and rename and flag it later, but if you’re hot on Sarah Palin’s trail and feel a “gotcha” soundbite coming on, you can be ready to capture it in seconds.

The only thing working against Voxie is that it’s subject to whatever bugs or missteps you might encounter with your iPhone in general. My longest test recording was 30 minutes and it came off without a hitch, but I would caution against students trying to record a 90 minute lecture while they sleep through class. You just never know when your phone will crash or receive an unexpected call. Voxie will pause your recording if the phone starts ringing, but it’s still up to you to remember to resume recording.

My only suggestions for improving Voxie would be to let the user customize the From field in the email function and maybe the allow the recording of phone calls, intrusive as that may seem. I sent a recording to a friend and it was sent from “Voxie System” which he probably assumed was spam, so I doubt he’ll ever see it. But that’s it… I got nothing else in the way of suggestions to make this thing better, and I’m used to writing laundry lists of proposed improvements.

If I ever find myself needing to record something on my iPhone there’s no question I’ll be using Voxie. It’s the most complete voice recorder you could ever hope for and it just might inspire you to chuck your $40 digital recorder out the window.

Tags: $1.99

ElectroCute

Michael (Admin) | Nov 20, 2008 Games

User rating: (4 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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As of today, ElectroCute is on sale at half off for $1.99.

Aliens are invading Earth and apparently they have a thing for sheep. What are they gonna do with all those farm animals? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to!

Your mission in ElectroCute is to zap the sheep-loving alien spaceships with lightning bolts produced from a two-finger touch. Spot a flying saucer, lay down two fingers to produce some lightning between them, and the bad guys fry.

There are various powerups that help you out along the way, but zapping aliens with lightning is pretty much all there is to the game. If you see an alien ship trying to abduct a poor little lamb with its green tractor beam, your best bet is probably to interrupt the kidnapping by giving the ship a quick one-finger tap and zap it when the animal is out of harm’s way. The sheep are just as allergic to lightning bolts as the aliens are, and slaughtering the flock is definitely frowned upon.

ElectroCute isn’t the greatest game I’ve ever played, but it’s fun and challenging and I always appreciate games that inject some originality (in this case, sheep) into the landscape. The graphics are good, the sound is ok (and suspiciously similar to Crash Landing), and it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll find aliens getting horny for sheep in any other games.

I’m hoping that Full Control ApS will take some steps to make the game more complete with an option to mute the sound, play while listening to music, and install a global score board in addition to the local one, but even now the game is pretty good.

According to the iTunes App Store description, ElectroCute is currently on sale at “half price” which is great, but frankly I think $1.99 is about the most I’d pay for a game like this. I like the game but, being the cheap bastard that I am, $4 seems like kind of a stretch.

Tags: $1.99

iChuck: Norris Joke Generator

Michael (Admin) | Nov 20, 2008 Entertainment

User rating: (4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)

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Chuck Norris once visited the Virgin Islands. They are now The Islands.

Einstein’s original Theory of Relativity was: if Chuck Norris kicks you, your relatives will feel it.

Chuck Norris is the only man who has, literally, beaten the odds. With his fists.

These and many other Chuck Norris gems can be yours with Digital Motion’s iChuck: Norris Joke Generator. Part of me wants to say that this app does something other than provide an endless parade of Chuck-isms, but (a) it doesn’t, and (b) Chuck Norris would undoubtedly track me down and murder me with his pinkie for implying that it should.

If you want to stretch the meaning of the word “features” you could count the buttons that allow you to send a Chuck joke to a friend or submit your own joke for inclusion in iChuck, but that really is where it ends. Get a joke, tap “another”, and after a quick punch-sound you’ve got another joke. Repeat as needed.

This is kind of a fun app to have around, but I’m not sure I’d pay a buck for it. The jokes are what they are… some are funny, others are just plain weird… but this app kind of feels like it should be free! Nonetheless, if you worship at the altar of Chuck you’d better just cough up the $.99 before you-know-who shows up and opens a can of whoopass with your name on it.

Tags: $.99

Q&F: ESPN Cameraman

Michael (Admin) | Nov 20, 2008 Games, Quick & Free

User rating: (1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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ESPN Cameraman rules!! You may have already tried this game in a bar or on a game console or in a video arcade (the kind with games not “movies”)… it’s that thing where you have two photos side-by-side and your mission is to highlight the differences between each with a tap of the finger.

Since EpicTilt built this app for ESPN all the photos are sports-related, but even if you’re not a sports fan it should still be fun as hell and supremely frustrating. It’s free, it’s packed with features, and it has that unmistakable gloss that can only be achieved when a big company showers the development team with cash!

Get this app right now - it’s a blast.

Tags: free, spot the difference