iPhone App Reviews

MouthOff

Michael (Admin) | Oct 28, 2009 Entertainment

User rating: (3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)

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I’ve never been a huge fan of apps that show a mouth that you hold in front of your face, but I have to admit that ustwo has put together a pretty good app here! I mean, if you’re gonna replace your mouth with your iPhone, you might as well do it with MouthOff.

When you hold this app over your face and start talking, your selected mouth will react to your iPhone’s mic and move along with you. Naturally this means that if you have an iPod Touch you’ll need a headset & mic to get that effect… imagine what a jackass you’ll look like… but it can be done!

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Tags: $.99, good for kids, halloween, seasonal

GhostWriter

Michael (Admin) | Oct 27, 2009 Photo & Video

User rating: (No Ratings Yet)

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Scrawling evil messages across photos in blood is soooo messy! GhostWriter will do it for you, and after you take your photo it’ll even throw in some Ghoulish Miasma if you want it to.

Ghoulish Miasma is really just some weird-looking orange fog that you probably won’t want on very many of your pics (don’t worry, it’s optional), but the spooky fonts comes in two varieties, Angered Spirit and Blood Writ, and they ain’t bad. GhostWriter comes with six innocent default messages that you can select individually or at random, and if you want to really damn someone to hell you can type in your own custom message! Sweet.

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Tags: $.99, good for kids, halloween, seasonal

Treat Street

Michael (Admin) | Oct 26, 2009 Games

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

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Need a diversion to keep the toddlers busy? Treat Street should fit the bill, for this week anyway!

Treat Street is a painfully cute trick-or-treating game where the goal is the same as in real life: ring a lot of doorbells and accumulate as much candy as you possibly can. There’s no score to keep and no possible way to lose… except for the rare occasion when a mean neighbor gives you something weird like an insect instead of candy.

You start off by choosing your costume with a 3-piece mix & match costume builder, and while you’re making your way down the neverending street you can check out your loot with the candy bag icon in the bottom right of the screen.

This is Elf Farm’s first release and they’re off to a great start with this very nicely made app. The game concept is super simple by design but the artwork and production values are awesome, and if it keeps your kids quiet for five minutes then it’s a dollar well spent.

iTunes Link – Treat Street
Version 1.0
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.1.2

Tags: $.99, good for kids, halloween, seasonal

Crack O’ Lantern

Michael (Admin) | Oct 22, 2009 Games

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

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Smashing pumpkins! Crack O’ Lantern has nothing to do with the band… smashing pumpkins, as in smashing them against a wall, is the object of this game.

It’s raining pumpkins (hallelujah) and your job is to (a) crack them on the ground, and then (b) smash them into little bits by tossing them against the wall. You gotta crack them first, though, and throwing uncracked pumpkins at the wall is an exercise in futility. When you see a special flaming red pumpkin, though, you can just wall-smash that one right away. Every pumpkin you successfully smash will fill your time meter, and when it’s filled all the way you get to advance to the next round.

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Tags: $.99, halloween

Hallowcarver

Michael (Admin) | Oct 21, 2009 Entertainment

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

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Well, if you’re gonna carve a pumpkin on your iPhone you might as well do it with Hallowcarver! I’ve only tried one other pumpkin carving app (Jack O’Lantern) and this one is waaaaay way better.

WNRS (We’re Not Rocket Scientists) went pretty nuts on this app and made it as slick as can be. Four different backgrounds are included, you get to choose from three different pumpkins, you can undo (nice!), and not only can you post your pumpkin to Twitter and Facebook but you can also share your creations on the Hallowcarver website! Cool. You can even change your background and pumpkin type in mid-carve.

A lot of developers seem to half-ass it on seasonal apps like this one, so I think it’s awesome when one goes all the way like this and really builds something worthwhile. You might delete Hallowcarver on November 1st, but this app has a lot of quality for a buck.

P.S. Carving a kickass pumpkin can win you an iPod Touch!

iTunes Link – Hallowcarver
Version 1.1
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.1.2

Tags: $.99, halloween, seasonal

IAR’s 6 Random Halloween Freebies

Michael (Admin) | Oct 16, 2009 Random Freebies

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

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Get your inner Pagan ready… Halloween is two weeks from tomorrow!

Free Halloween Sounds by Pixel Narrative: Make a whole bunch o’ scary sounds including Howling Wolf, Deadly Scream, and Croaking Frog. Huh… croaking frog? Eh, ok!

Halloween Music by nuTsie: Looks like this app gets updated for Christmas as well, at which point it will probably be renamed Christmas Music! Free music that you can buy or just listen to in-app (must play in shuffle mode to hear the full songs).

Halloween Deluxe by Schatzisoft: This one’s a jack of all trades… spooky sounds, days until Halloween countdown, costume ideas, and scary facts.

Halloween Quick Turn by Portable Zoo: There’s a crazy jack-o-lantern bouncing around your screen… don’t ask me why! Turn your iPhone like a steering wheel to keep him (or her?) moving towards the correct color.

AdLibs Lite: Halloween Edition by E.E. Flobes: I reviewed this app last year… not bad! If you remember MadLibs from when you were little, this app will feel very familiar.

Halloween Photo Free by ObjectGraph: Take pictures and dress ‘em up with Halloween silliness.

Tags: free, halloween

IAR’s 6 Random Halloween Freebies

Michael (Admin) | Oct 9, 2009 Random Freebies

User rating: (No Ratings Yet)

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In a few weeks it’ll be time to dress up the kids like monsters and send them out into the streets to beg for candy! This is the first of a few rounds of untested but free Halloween iPhone apps to get everyone in the “spirit”. Haha check it out, I made a Halloween pun! I’m so clever.

Halloween Wordsearch by FinBlade: I reviewed this app almost a year ago and I’m glad to see it’s still around and still free. Good app!

Halloween PhotoCraft by EndLoop Systems: Dress up your pics with Halloween-themed stamps and whatnot.

Zombie Me by Portegno Apps: Kinda like Halloween PhotoCraft, but bigger and grosser!

Halloween Memory Match Game by ObjectGraph: Sounds pretty self-explanatory, right?!

reMovem Halloween Edition by Mundue.net: I reviewed reMovem (then called Jawbreaker) within the first week of starting this site and I wasn’t impressed… but that was a year ago! Maybe the game’s gotten better?

Whack-a-Halloween by Nguyen Minh Duc: In this game you whack Halloweens. Ok, actually you whack scarecrows n stuff… just shut up and start whacking!

Oh hey btw, could you do me a favor and DIGG this? Shameless, I know! Thanks~

Tags: free, halloween

Halloween C@rds

Michael (Admin) | Oct 30, 2008 Utilities

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

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I’ve reviewed a couple of other iPhone apps that allow you to send “greeting cards” but so far Hot Chili Apps is the only one that’s gotten it right. Halloween Pumpkinizer is ok but you’re limited to sending a pumpkin picture. Stylem Media’s Greetings (formerly known as Stylem Greetings) was, at the time of the review, a large collection of the garbage that litters MySpace comment boxes. Not sure if anything’s changed there since I uninstalled that app a long time ago.

Halloween C@rds lets you create a truly customized greeting card. There are three different types of templates: pattern, picture, and photo. Currently there are 11 of each for a total of 33 templates, and the photo templates allow you to insert a photo into the card! Pretty cool. The templates all have high-quality images and they range from cute and cartoony to more serious and kind of morbid.

Text size, font, and color are customizable, and you can also set horizontal and vertical alignment. Some text effects would be nice here, like maybe dropshadow or outline because some of the templates make it hard to read your words, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anything to truly complain about in this app.

Some other future upgrades that I’d love to see would be more text color options, more templates, and more fonts. A lot of the fonts currently included look pretty similar, and a Halloween greeting card app could definitely benefit from some “scarier” typefaces.

Hot Chili Apps also makes Birthday C@rds and Love C@rds which obviously contain dramatically different template sets to serve their respective purposes. I’ll be reviewing those later as updates are released, but if you like sending greeting cards around for various reasons, any of these “C@rd” apps will do the job and do it well. $1.99 isn’t much to spend for this kind of thing and I’d even go as far as saying the photo templates alone are worth the price of admission.

Tags: $1.99, halloween

Singing Pumpkins

Michael (Admin) | Oct 28, 2008 Entertainment

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

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Singing Pumpkins is probably the best Halloween app I’ve reviewed yet! It shows a collection of very cute cartoon pumpkins that you can tap to make your own melodies or sound effects.

Each pumpkin has its own way of singing a note and occasionally yells something out of character just for fun, and if you actually possess some musical talent you might be able to cobble together a tune.

If you’d prefer Halloween sound effects over music, tap the music note in the bottom left corner and the pumpkins will drop the singing and switch to making spooky noises and saying things like “I vant to bite your neeeck” in a thick Transylvanian accent.

If you have or know any children, get this free app right now! I guarantee they will enjoy the hell out of it and some single non-parental adults (like me) probably will, too. I’m even thinking about incorporating this app into my Halloween costume if I can figure out how to waterproof my iPhone from the inevitable beer spills it’ll have to endure.

RAMDreams, the maker of Singing Pumpkins, doesn’t appear to have any other apps in the App Store right now but I’m already looking forward to whatever they come up with next.

Tags: free, good for kids, halloween, simple

Puzzoodle Halloween

Michael (Admin) | Oct 28, 2008 Games

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

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I was expecting Puzzoodle Halloween to be a total waste of time because the title screen is ass ugly, but it’s really a pretty impressive jigsaw puzzle app.

This free Halloween version of Fulltilt Interactive’s non-themed $2.99 Puzzoodle Jigsaw contains 20 jigsaw puzzles that, when completed, form the pieces of a bigger Halloween puzzle. As you work on each puzzle, just double-tap the individual puzzle pieces to rotate them and drag them to wherever you think they should go.

If you ever get stuck and can’t solve a puzzle, you can take a peek at what the finished product should look like or you can just throw in the towel and tell the app to solve the puzzle for you.

The thing that I found most surprising about Puzzoodle Halloween is the production quality. The graphics are top-notch, and even the options and help menus are super cool. I’m a major arachnophobic so all the little tarantulas decorating this app kind of freaked me out at first, but they weren’t so bad when covered with puzzle pieces.

These Puzzoodles aren’t exactly “easy”, so there’s a lot of playtime here that can definitely extend past Halloween. Older kids, like maybe ages 10 and up, could probably handle the workload but I’d bet that younger children would lose interest fast.

Fulltilt Interactive did a really nice job of using the Halloween season to show off what they’re capable of producing. Puzzoodle Halloween is free so you’ve got nothing to lose by trying it out, and if you love it to death you might actually decide to pay for the non-themed Puzzoodle Jigsaw which lets you make jigsaw puzzles out of your own pictures.

Tags: free, halloween, puzzle, traditional

HorrorScope

Michael (Admin) | Oct 28, 2008 Entertainment

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

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HorrorScope is an ad-supported and very quirky Halloween-style horoscope app. The predictions are goofy with just a slight hint of the death and misery that make Halloween such a popular “holiday”, but I wouldn’t recommend it for kids because they just won’t get it.

On HorrorScope’s App Store page, Delicious Morsel says they will be providing new HorrorScopes daily for this week leading up to Halloween. After that I’m guessing the frequency may drop back down to its pre-Halloween-week level of twice weekly.

HorrorScope is free so go ahead and have some fun with these oddball predictions of your Halloween demise.

Tags: free, halloween

Free Hangman

Michael (Admin) | Oct 28, 2008 Games

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

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I’ve only tried one other hangman app (Hangman by JamSoft) and MobilityWare’s Free Hangman is definitely superior in just about every way.

In single-player mode you get to choose from a bunch of themed word lists, one of which is Halloween of course, and in two-player mode one of the “players” can type in their own word for the other player to guess.

In keeping with the wildly popular Halloween theme of publicly executing people who look different from you, Free Hangman’s victim is a spooky little pumpkin-headed scarecrow guy who is accompanied by a buff Chippendale dancer wearing an executioner’s hood. 

If the hanging Mr. Pumpkinhead creeps you out, there’s an option to change him to an innocuous stick figure. The Chippendale executioner stays, though.

When you’ve solved your word, you even get to see the definition by tapping a big blue question mark icon which opens an in-app Dictionary.com query to display the word’s meaning. Cool! Kudos to MobilityWare for thinking of everything.

Free Hangman is ad-supported but that shouldn’t scare you away from installing it. If ads bug you, just pay $.99 for the ad-free version. MobilityWare also makes a ton of other apps, most of which are either free or cost just $.99.

Tags: free, good for kids, halloween, traditional