iPhone App Reviews

App Sale: Elf

Michael (Admin) | Dec 14, 2009 App Sale Alert, Games

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

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Elf is on sale for free – normally $.99

This is one of those games where you really don’t need any instructions… just tap to make your elf jump, and then left and right to try to keep him flying higher and higher by grabbing all the colorful doodads that are floating around. Some items will earn point bonuses, others result in jumps of varying strength, and one of them you should avoid if at all possible.

Elf isn’t the greatest game ever but it’s not bad for some short-lived amusement, or maybe even hours and hours of amusement if you’re one of those people who refuses to quit until you’ve made it to the top of the global scoreboard. The graphics are nice, the elf has a gigantic mouth which is kind of funny, and it’s free so hey why not.

iTunes Link – Elf

Tags: $.99, Christmas, seasonal, simple

App Sale: Santa’s Sack

Michael (Admin) | Dec 11, 2009 App Sale Alert, Games

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Santa’s Sack is on sale for free – normally $.99

Normally I don’t bother announcing that an app’s on sale unless it’s really good, but I feel compelled to announce this one in case you come across it when it actually costs money! Santa’s Sack has the potential to be a good game with its nice graphics and all, but there’s not a lot of good stuff to say about the gameplay.

The object of the game is to catch all the falling presents in Santa’s big sack, and to do this you have to tilt your iPhone left and right. Sounds fine, but the way Santa slides around just seems too buggy to make this a fun, playable game. Sometimes he’s very slow to respond, sometimes he doesn’t respond at all, and I found the whole thing to be pretty frustrating. Yes, I restarted my iPhone, and that seemed to help a little but I still wasn’t impressed.

Luckily this game is free so there’s no harm in trying it. If you do give it a shot, come back and lemme know if it’s as bad as I think it is or if I’m just an idiot!

iTunes Link – Santa’s Sack
Version 1.0
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.1.2

Santa's big green sack isn't very good at sliding around on the snow

Tags: $.99, Christmas, seasonal

App Sale: Santa Naughty Nice Detector

Michael (Admin) | Dec 9, 2009 App Sale Alert, Entertainment

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Well duh, *everyone* is naughty!

Santa Naughty Nice Detector is on sale for free – normally $.99

Most young children are pretty stupid, and if you play it up enough they might actually believe that your iPhone can detect whether they’re naughty or nice! And if they believe that, they might also believe they’re suddenly on Santa’s shitlist, and everyone knows you don’t get any presents when the fat man’s got it in for you.

Normally I wouldn’t bother writing about an app like this, but it’s Christmas season and silly things like this come with the territory. aHandSoft even went as far as building in a “chance” meter that, with some sleight of hand, could make it appear as if the meter actually works when one kid is nice and the other is decidedly naughty.

This Naughty Nice Detector looks very festive and it’s executed pretty well, but still I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t pay a dollar for this app… free, however, is doable if you’re in a house full of gullible children or at an office Christmas party in need of some holiday nonsense.

iTunes Link -Santa Naughty Nice Detector

Tags: $.99, Christmas, practical joke, seasonal

App Sale: Flight Before Christmas

Michael (Admin) | Dec 4, 2009 App Sale Alert, Games

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Flight Before Christmas is on sale for free – normally $.99

Flight Before Christmas reminds me a lot of ATC and Flight Control, except instead of directing jumbo jets you’re steering Santa’s sleigh! All you need to do is drag a path from the sleigh to all the houses you need to visit, all the while dodging the other air traffic that could bring Christmas to an abrupt end.

There’s no global scoreboard and basically nothing in the features department except for an instruction screen and a pause button, but for a Christmas app this is really pretty good. Enabled Solutions took the time to make the game pretty and for the low, low price of nothing this game is worth taking for a spin.

Enabled says the sale lasts this weekend only, so hurry up and get it!

iTunes Link – Flight Before Christmas

Tags: $.99, Christmas, seasonal

App Sale: Holiday Smash

Michael (Admin) | Dec 3, 2009 App Sale Alert, Games

User rating: (4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)

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Holiday Smash is on sale for free – normally $1.99

‘Tis the season to… download all the Christmas-themed apps that descend upon the App Store at this time of year! Holiday Smash is basically a jacked up version of Breakout, and the stuff you’re breaking is all in the shape of various holiday things like snowmen and Christmas trees. Your paddle moves left and right with finger drags, and it also shoots lasers! So even when your balls are flying around (powerups make multiple balls possible) your lasers will be hard at work as they hack away at the stuff floating above.

Sea Lion Games just released this app the other day at $1.99 and immediately dropped the price to free, so who knows if it’ll actually go back to costing money. Either way, it’s free right now and it’s not bad! Kids tend to get antsy this time of year, so even if you’re not a fan of this kind of game yourself it could at least serve as a distraction for the little monsters in your life.

iTunes Link – Holiday Smash

Tags: $1.99, arcade, Christmas, seasonal

B-Day Giveaway: Christmas C@rds

Michael (Admin) | Jul 30, 2009 Utilities

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

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It’s a little early for emailing Christmas cards around, but when the time comes you’ll definitely want this app!! I dunno why it says “no ratings” on my App Store price image, but this app has earned a legitimate 3.5 star average and it’s worth every penny of the $1.99 asking price.

Hot Chili Apps does cards right. I loved this app last year, and I’m sure I’ll love it again this year.

iTunes Link – Christmas C@rds
Hot Chili Apps website

FUNNIEST. CHRISTMAS CARD. EVER!!!!

* Today is iPhone App Reviews.net’s birthday *

Tags: $1.99, Christmas, seasonal

Q&F: Free Mistletoe: Smooch or Smack?

Michael (Admin) | Dec 24, 2008 Entertainment, Quick & Free

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

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The iTunes App Store is overflowing with free mistletoe apps and Bottle Rocket’s version is as good as any. It tilts as you move your iPhone and it also features smooch and smack counters so you can keep track of your success rate as you make your rounds at the Christmas party.

Personally I have no use for the smooch counter because I always get smacked when I try to con girls into making out with me, but hopefully you’re not that pathetic!

The 5 smooches are from my dog

Tags: Christmas, free

Whack It: Santa

Michael (Admin) | Dec 24, 2008 Games

User rating: (4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Didn’t get what you wanted for Christmas? Angry at Santa Claus for letting you down? Beat the hell out of him in Whack It: Santa!

MadInSweden has three versions of their Whack It game and the other two are Frogs and For Kids. The only one I’ve played is Santa, but I’m assuming they’re all the same but with different themes… tap the Santas/Frogs/Jungle Animals as they peek out of holes, just like the whack-a-mole game we all know and hate. I mean love.

If you like tapping stuff really fast, this game is for you. The difficulty ramps up pretty fast so be ready for your fingers to take a pounding, and you also need to keep an eye out for Bad Santa who shouldn’t be touched.

I can’t say that I’d pay $1.99 for this app, but the Whack It: Frogs game is only $.99 so if price is an issue maybe you’d be better off trying that one instead. Plus you won’t feel so dumb playing it on December 26th.

Tags: $1.99, Christmas, classic

Christmas Camera

Michael (Admin) | Dec 24, 2008 Photo & Video

User rating: (No Ratings Yet)

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Christmas Day is tomorrow so you may be thinking that an app like Christmas Camera is already on the verge of becoming obsolete until next year, but that’s not entirely true. Christmas Camera is a collection of photo templates that you can put over your photos, and aside from Christmas templates it also includes “Love”, “Fashion”, and “New Year” designs for making your otherwise crappy photos a little more interesting.

There really isn’t a lot going on in this app… pick one of 31 templates, pick a photo or snap a new one, and save it. I have no problem with simplicity and not every app has to have more features than a Swiss Army knife, but the thing that stands out most in this app is its one gigantic flaw: it sucks at handling photos!

The templates are great. They’re colorful, they’re cute, and some are so sickenly gaudy that it’s kind of funny, but getting your photos to fit these templates is the problem. When you choose a photo from your camera roll you get the chance to Move & Scale, but you can only scale your photo to be larger not smaller. If this doesn’t sound important, wait ’til you’re trying to fit your photo into a template that has cutouts in very specific places… if those cutouts don’t match your photo, you’re screwed because photo repositioning is also a near impossibility.

One thing Christmas Camera does right, however, is it applies the template to your camera view when you’re taking a new photo so you can position it correctly. Nice move.

Wondershare can fix this app, but I think it’ll take some work. They need to cut out the Move & Scale step which is basically useless and allow the user to do all moving and scaling with the template applied. Being able to preview templates before taking or selecting a photo is also an important step that’s missing. We also need to be able to scale photos up AND down, rotate the image freely, and move/scale photos beyond the visible area. I know these things are all possible because I’ve seen them done in other apps! Christmas C@rds is a great example of photo handling done right.

Some of the templates in Christmas Camera, ie: ones with wider photo areas, aren’t so prone to the problems I’m griping about so I wouldn’t call this app a total loss… but I really don’t think it’s quite ready for primetime and it’s definitely not a $3 app. Yet.

Tags: $2.99, Christmas, Photo & Video

MyChristmas

Michael (Admin) | Dec 16, 2008 Entertainment

User rating: (5 votes, average: 4.60 out of 5)

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I don’t know the people at Talee Talee, but after poking around MyChristmas for a while it’s pretty clear that they took a good look at the mess of Christmas apps hitting iTunes and they came to the conclusion that it’s all just soooooo unnecessary. And they’re right! Seasonal apps are usually very lightweight and have a pretty short shelf life so why not roll them all up into one download?

And thus was born “The Christmas Compendium” that is MyChristmas. This kitchen sink app includes all of the following:

• Two Christmas Countdowns
• “A Christmas Carol” eBook
• 18 Christmas carol lyrics
• 7 instrumental Christmas songs
• 2 pretty good Christmas games (Solitaire and Match)
• Ding-’em-yourself Christmas Bells, pretty cool
• Snow Scene, a hilariously bad “snow globe”
• A flickering Christmas candle
• Mistletoe with smooching sounds
• 2 Christmas sounds (Santa and Rudolph)
• New Year’s Eve Countdown
• Auld Lang Syne lyrics
• A fireworks display

Whoa! That’s a lotta holiday crap crammed into one application.

By themselves none of these apps-within-an-app will blow you away, but as a collection it’s pretty impressive. You’ve got your countdown, the eBook, the music, the lyrics… it’s Christmas overload! But it’s way more efficient than installing 10 different apps that you’ll be deleting come January.

The best parts of MyChristmas are probably the music, the Solitaire and Match games, and the Christmas Bells. The mistletoe could also come in handy if you’re “that guy”, the one who’s always ramming your tongue down a girl’s throat when she thinks she’s leaning in for an innocent holiday peck.

An interesting thing that Talee Talee built into MyChristmas is its ability to “talk” to iChoose when you can’t decide what part of the Compendium you want to play with. On any menu screen you just tap on “iChoose Choice” and the app will temporarily switch to iChoose (which you have to have installed already), make a selection for you, and then kick you back to the selected MyChristmas section.

It’s true that a lot of the apps included in MyChristmas can be had for free and some of them, like the Snow Scene, are pretty underwhelming, but you could do a lot worse for a buck. If searching the iTunes App Store for various Christmas apps sounds like a pain in the ass that you just don’t want to deal with, spend $.99 on MyChristmas and be done with it. Even despite a little lameness here and there, MyChristmas comes with plenty of value to make it worth buying.

Tags: $.99, Christmas

Snowdome

Michael (Admin) | Dec 14, 2008 Entertainment

User rating: (2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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You couldn’t pay me to put a real snow globe on display in my hole-in-the-wall apartment unless it was filled with naked ladies, and even then I’d have to think about it! Snowdome, however, is an impressive and super-accurate reproduction of the real thing that I would gladly show off to anyone who wants to see what a quality App Store product looks like.

Snowdome comes with six different holiday songs including Auld Lang Syne and Blue Danube for post-Christmas relevance, and all of the songs sound like they could be playing from one of those pin-and-cylinder contraptions that goes inside a real wind-up snow globe or music box. Also included are six different background scenes that all look awesome behind the swirling snow flakes, and there are a few different ways to affect the snow’s movement which all look pretty right-on in the physics department.

As improvements go, it seems natural to wish you could stick your own photos in the snow globe, so hopefully Yotta Digital will make that possible in a future update. Another improvement that would be nice to see is the option to play all of the music in a row or randomly because the songs are pretty short as they also tend to be when you wind up the player on a real snow globe.

Yesterday I wrote about three free snow globe apps that ranged from weird to buggy to nice-but-not-actually-a-snow-globe. Although I looked at about six different free apps before settling on those three, not one of them even came close to achieving what Yotta Digital has created in Snowdome… and I’m not saying this because Yotta Digital is advertising the app on this site! It’s just that good.

If you’re gonna pay a buck for a snow globe, get this one. It’s abundantly clear that a lot of care and attention went into making Snowdome and you won’t be disappointed.

Click to watch Yotta Digital's Snowdome video

Tags: $.99, Christmas, good for kids

Santa Wings: Rudolph’s Christmas Flight

Michael (Admin) | Dec 13, 2008 Games

User rating: (3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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Gotta hand it to Bottle Rocket… they know how to build a quality iPhone app. Santa Wings: Rudolph’s Christmas Flight puts you in the driver’s seat of Santa’s sleigh on a midnight joyride through a snowy moonlit mountain range.

The 3D rendering of the landscape is great, but it’s the little things that make this a pretty kickass holiday iPhone experience. While you’re flying around with your team of reindeer you can listen to four different Christmas tunes, fly with reindeer or without, and switch between “flying” (more responsive movement) and “floating” (less responsive).

The slider on the right of the screen adjusts flying speed, and the little Christmas tree air freshener at the top of the screen tells you how much you’re tilting since it’s easy to get disoriented if you’re hotdogging it on the accelerometer controls. If the air freshener is completely gone from view that means you’re flying upside down! Crashing into the mountains will splatter snowflakes around your field of vision and it also pisses off Santa who registers his displeasure with some unintelligible grunts if it happens too often.

Bottle Rocket even took the time to build an angle adjustment into the iPhone’s settings menu so that you can fly your sleigh from any posture, and if you feel like rockin’ the iPod during flight there’s a toggle switch for shutting off Santa Wings’ built-in music.

There’s no “end game” in Santa Wings… it’s built to fly, not land. With that said, grownups may be briefly mesmerized by this Christmas flight simulator but not for very long. Children, on the other hand, would likely get a lot more out of this app and I kind of get the feeling it was built with them in mind anyway.

Is Santa Wings: Rudolph’s Christmas Flight worth a dollar? Well, that depends. Would you pay a buck to get your kids to leave you alone for 10 minutes? Hell yeah you would! You really can’t put a pricetag on peace and quiet and goodwill towards Mommy and Daddy.

Bottle Rocket also makes a non-themed version of this app, Wings 2: Flight Simulator Experience.

Edit: Tap on Rudolph for a little surprise. Plus, there’s a secret North Pole to be found! I didn’t know this until reading some App Store reviews, but I found it. Can you?

Tags: $.99, 3D, Christmas, good for kids