Reviews - page 105

The genre of tower defense has been fairly represented on iOS over the past several years, with notable entries like Fieldrunners and Kingdom Rush turning in fantastic examples of fixed and variable path classic tower defense gameplay.

iPad-only RoboMouse HD, then, is a new, well-balanced entry to the genre, and while it brings nothing innovative to the table, it’s adorable and provides a solid set of features that make it an essential entry to any tower defense fan’s gaming library.

Getting kids to read 19th century literature is virtually impossible unless you attach a grade to it these days. While I was content with thick tomes of Brönte(s) and Austen in high school, my classmates were quick to avoid most books not written by popular authors within the last 20 years. If only someone made an infinite runner with book passages as the levels so children would have to look at words when playing games!

Stride & Prejudice by No Crusts Interactive is a surprisingly simple yet elegant way to read Pride & Prejudice without abandoning your love of repeatedly tapping your phone. You control the novel’s heroine Elizabeth (Lizzy) Bennet as she leaps daringly from sentence to sentence. Depending on which gameplay mode selected, you can actually read all of Pride & Prejudice at a leisurely pace.

Using a laptop on your lap is a pretty bad idea. Not only does it get hot, it also forces you to hunch your back or neck, and if you have any kind of carpal-tunnel problems they’ll make themselves painfully obvious pretty quick.

The Curb only fixes one of these, but it does do a pretty good job.

I’m sad to say that if you clicked on this review hoping that Girl Washing was a soon-to-be-removed “sexy” game for iOS that you’re in for some hot…laundry washing action. Yep. Girl Washing is all about a cute girl doing chores instead of you washing some totally objectified anime chick (thankfully).

Anyway, Girl Washing is a weird take on a matching game. Rather than swiping to move clothes into lines, you’re actually assembling the game pieces on a grid, trying to match five items together. When you do, the clothes end up in a washing queue that you then have to drag into the washing machine. Soon, all the laundry starts piling up and matching five pairs gets incredibly difficult. I’ve spent a few hours beating my head against the seemingly automatic fail state Girl Washing pushed on you if you put even a sock out of place.

I’ve played and reviewed my share of endless runners, but Ooga Jump, a new game from Bolt Creative, takes endlessness to that other axis.

If you thought I was going to say “to new heights,” shame on you.

Ooga Jump is an “endless jumper” that was originally a minigame in Bolt’s earlier title, Pocket God. You control a Pygmy who for some reason or another is taking an infinite voyage upward via a series of platforms and collectible goodies. On his way, he encounters deadly statues, spiders, meteors, and wind, all of which want to cut his trip short by making him really, really dead.

I’m a big fan of physics-based puzzles, but the trouble is most of them relate to altering an object’s trajectory as it falls rather than manipulating things.

Drei by Etter Studio GmbH does away with falling oranges and rolling balls and offers instead increasingly difficult building block puzzles that require you to balance objects, shapes, and negotiate with other players.

Developer Gaijin Games’ Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien quickly became one of my favorite games this year when it launched for consoles and PC back in February. It had a lot of personality, precise gameplay, and was just challenging enough to keep you on your toes but not enough to be frustrating.

The iOS port, Bit.Trip Run!, keeps the original’s levels, fantastic graphics, and entertaining narration from voice actor Charles Martinet (the voice of Nintendo’s Mario). So it’s mostly the same game. But it drops the necessarily accurate button controls in favor of taps and swipes for the mobile platform, and that really cuts the game down a few notches. I’d almost say that it makes it unplayable, but that’s not quite the case.

But it does take a great deal of patience to play well.

I picked up one of Apple’s new iPad Airs on Friday. I didn’t think I’d be impressed — but I am. It’s light, fast, and beautifully constructed. Is it the perfect tablet? It’s pretty close. Here’s all you need to know:

• It’s amazingly light. It almost feels hollow. It’s much lighter than you expect. Which means that it’s effortless to hold for reading and carrying around. It’s a big and important difference. It’s super portable.
• It’s plenty fast. Annoying little lags on previous iPads — like slow rendering Web pages with multiple tabs — are gone. It’s much more useable than my iPad 3.
• Battery life is great — more than 10 hours of continuous use.

And there you have it. It’s almost as light as the iPad mini with the speed and big, beautiful screen of a full-size tablet. Go get one. It’s great.

[Editor’s note: This review has been stickied to the top of Cult of Mac. Scroll down for more news.]

Let’s face it, we’ve been waiting for Apple to make drastic changes to the iPad since it released the third-generation device in early 2012. While it did introduce a high-resolution Retina display with that model, and it has made nice improvements in speed and other areas since then, we’ve all been clamoring for improvements to its design.

We’ve got those with the iPad Air — and a whole lot more. The new slate looks just like a larger version of the iPad mini. It maintains its 9.7-inch Retina display, but it has narrower bezels, a substantially thinner design — it is now just as thin as the iPad mini at 7.5mm — and it’s 28% lighter than its predecessor at just one pound.

In addition to that, we get Apple’s incredible 64-bit A7 processor that promises up to two times the power and graphics performance of the A6X, the new M7 motion coprocessor that made its debut in the iPhone 5s last month, and two W-Fi antennas with MIMO technology. And all of this will cost you just $100 more than the iPad 2.

If you fancy yourself an expert on abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols, you might want to have a go at Name It!, a new trivia game that focuses on those three things (known collectively — and somewhat awkwardly — as “AASs”). It’s a pretty niche subject, really, but the game covers a lot of ground, including such disparate topics as Presidential history (“POTUS”) and the term “YOLO,” which stands for “I have failed at life.”

Name It! throws a startling number of questions at you across four rounds. And it’s all great fun until you get tired of it.

Yesterday, I reviewed the first part of The Hunting, an interactive zombie film for iOS devices. I had some issues with its actual interactivity, which mostly amounted to swiping to put on pants and a meaningless choice between leaving a house through a window or a door.

Part 2 is out now, and unlike the first installment, it costs money. But it’s longer, has more interesting decision points, and is scary as hell.

So basically, remember the problems I had with the first one? Forget them.

I’m a huge fan of minimalist bags to carry about my tech items. Why drag around a massive messenger bag to just hold my Macbook Air, an iPad mini, and some power cables? Sometimes though, you need to carry more than just the basics, like a full size iPad, extra batteries, keys, wallets, books, and the like.

The Staad Slim Backpack, then, is a nice mix between these two extremes: it carries the essentials in a compact design, but has a bit more space than you’d think, letting me add in some extras, like a portable power-brick and a pair of glasses in a case.

Tellingly, this backpack is a well-designed thing of beauty, with nary a stitch or seam out of place. The zippers are solid and immeasurably useful, and the placement of pockets is ingenious. The clasp is simple yet secure, and the colors–from the chocolate leather of the front flap to the light brown of the waxed canvas to the inner lining’s patterned orange–just scream style and substance. This is a backpack I can use for a long, long time.

Parent thieves are the worst. They’re even more despicable when they kidnap your parents and fill the scary, nebulous cave system behind your house full of monsters!

This is Callys’ reality in Callys Caves. The evil Dr. Herbert has whisked Callys’ family away and its up to her to buy enough shotgun upgrades to slay her way to victory.

The Hunting is an interactive zombie film made for — and with — the iPhone. It presents a world in which the undead rise because of a spontaneous global failure of antibiotics. But that’s not really important; the main thing is that zombies are in the room.

The first part of the story runs about 12 minutes, and it sets the scene pretty well. Your character (you) wake up, put your pants on, and discover that a bunch of things are on fire in the distance, and some ugly sucker in your kitchen wants to kill you. You do a bit of swiping and tapping, make a couple choices, and then you’re done.

It’s very short, but what’s there is promising.

Pixelz is a puzzle game because the developer Dariusz Cieśla says it is. The playing field is a autumnal spread of colored blocks, and a little indicator in the top right of the screen says “target 19.”

Pixelz wants nothing from you (it’s free), offers no instruction on how to play it, and exists in a soundless tranquility many commuter gamers might appreciate.

If that headline reads like the tag for a family-friendly animated film — possibly one released during the holiday season — it’s because Mimpi, an adorable platformer from developers Crescent Moon Games and Silicon Jelly, has all the charm of those movies. The good ones, I mean. The bad ones aren’t charming at all.

But a cute visual style isn’t enough, so Mimpi also has puzzles, hidden items, and items to unlock. And it all happens across eight big levels, each with their own visual and play styles.

In short, it’s a cute game and plenty of it.

It’s a little hard to describe what exactly Device 6, the new project from developer Simogo, is, exactly.

It’s kind of a visual novel. It’s also kind of a puzzle/escape game. But it’s also its own unique animal, a challenging artistic experiment unlike anything I’ve seen before. It will confuse you, impress you, and ultimately provide one of the most memorable experiences the App Store has to offer.

So, yeah. It’s pretty good.

When I was younger, I had a crappy little electronic game in which I controlled a car driving down the highway. I had a little wheel that could turn the car left and right, kinda, and I was supposed to avoid hazards. It was apparently the world’s worst-maintained highway because every 10 feet, it was like, barrel, barrel, squirrel, bush ….

There were bushes growing on the highway.

Anyway, Mega Dead Pixel, a new free-to-play title from developer About Fun Games, reminds me a lot of that game, and not just because they have about the same complexity of graphics. It’s also equally moody and just as frustrating at times.

In order to make the Retina MacBook Pro so thin, Apple had to make some sacrifices. One of those was doing away with its optical drive — which is no longer an issue for most in the digital age — and another was using flash storage rather than old-fashion hard-disk drives.

But Apple made another, slightly more subtle change that the average consumer may not have noticed. It did away with the Kensington lock, providing users with no way to secure their device to their workstation to prevent it from being stolen.

Fortunately, Maclocks has a number of solutions to solve this problem, and I’ve been testing two of them over the past few months. First up is the Lockable Cover, a protective case that covers the top and the bottom of your MacBook Pro, and adds a lock to its base that you can plug a universal security cable into.

The Lockable Cover costs $24.71 on its own, or $30.90 if you need the security cable as well. That’s a small price to pay to protect your beloved notebook when you can’t always keep an eye on it, but is the Lockable Cover worth it?

This week sees the release of Batman: Arkham Origins on consoles, but if you can’t wait to spend your nights beating criminals to death with your bare hands, a companion game is out now for your favorite iOS device.

Batman: Arkham Origins is a free-to-play brawler in which you play as the Dark Knight in a series of battles against groups of criminals who attack him one at a time. Between bouts, you upgrade Batman’s abilities, purchase new equipment and suits, and wait for your stamina to recharge so that you can go on more missions.

It’s pretty much everything you’d expect from a free-to-play Batman game. But it has Batman in it, so there’s that.

Board games have enjoyed quite the resurgence on the iPad, with digital versions of just about any game folks can think of, including Monopoly, Risk, Ticket To Ride, and Small World, just to name a few.

Many of these games have excellent pass and play gameplay, which lets gamers play a turn and then hand the iPad over to a friend to take their turn. What’s been missing, though, from many of these games, is real-world dice. There’s something delightful about the randomness of the analog cube, used in all kinds of board games from Backgammon to Yahtzee.

Dice+, then, aims to remedy that with a big, lovely, bluetooth-powered die, ready with its own app full of dice games that will work with the plastic die. Suffice it to say that playing a digital game with a real-world die is, simply put, sublime.

Fans of Games Magazine will know the puzzles in developer Casual Labs’ Paint It Back as “Paint by Numbers.” Owners of the Nintendo DS portable system might recognize them as Picross, and giant puzzle nerds might know them as Nonograms for Non Ishida, the Japanese graphics editor who invented them.

The point is that Paint It Black is not doing anything new; this puzzle type, in which solvers use logic to determine which squares in a grid to fill in to make a picture, is readily available a lot of places. But that’s not to say that this app is a boring rehash.

In fact, whether you’re a fan of Nonograms or picking them up for the first time, Paint It Black has a lot to offer.

Everybody loves the circus, right? You know, except for the animal abuse and the crowds and the terrifying clowns? The rest of it’s alright, though: Trapeze artists and human cannonballs and food that makes you wonder why we ever bothered inventing food before we had batter to dip and fry it in.

It’s in the spirit of the good parts of the big-top experience that we have Ring Run Circus, a self-described “ringformer” (like a platformer but with rings) by developer Kalio. It’s a two-button affair where you control one of three acrobats who skate around the surfaces of giant rings to pick up a key and take it to the lock to release the celebratory, end-of-level confetti.

It sounds simple, but its controls belie an intricate, complex puzzle game with impressive variety and challenge.

Old people like me grew up with Choose Your Own Adventure books. This occasionally ridiculous series introduced an entire generation of children to both the importance of choice and the oddball nuances of second-person narrative.

Following in that tradition is the Gamebook Adventures franchise, which adds a dice-driven, role-playing-style combat system to its branching fantasy storyline. The eighth entry, Curse of the Assassin, is out now; it’s a slow-paced, text-heavy, epic beast of an experience.

So basically, it’s everything people love about those books.

Sometimes you want to play a game on your iPhone, but you’re also carrying groceries or a bouquet of flowers or a sandwich.

Seriously, it happens.

And when it happens, it’s usually impossible. Some games demand two hands, or you can only play them in landscape mode, which is unwieldy. You end up looking like a person in the black-and-white clips of an infomercial, for whom opening a can of tuna or dusting are the most difficult acts imaginable. And nobody wants to be a black-and-white infomercial person.

But Rotato by Floor 27 Industries solves all of that by being easily playable with one hand. And ridiculous analogies aside, it’s actually pretty fun and addictive.