Frapstr Digest: October 2008 In Review
by Eric March on November 2, 2008 at 4:12 am
A few weeks back I had planned to start doing weekly digests of the previous week of releases on Frapstr, the Free App Store Review. Partly to maintain a connection to its original home, but also to bring some cool stuff (and some crap stuff) to those who may not know about Frapstr or don’t read on a regular basis. (And if you don’t, you’re missing out on the greatest thing since … well, since … since the last great thing that was something to miss out on.) Things got fairly busy though so I never got around to it. So now I’m going to rectify that with a recap of some of October’s highs and lows around the App Store. Come. Walk with me.
Oh, and I’m not linking directly to the screenshots here because it makes them look kind of ugly, so if you want the full screenies, click on the app name or more tags for each entry.
App Name: iDayDream Lite
Developer: Brian Smith
Category: Entertainment
I like toys. Not the electronic kind — well, not <em>only</em> the electronic kind — but I’m talking pointless Zen-like applications that are just fun to play with and serve no greater purpose than your own amusement, like those sandboxes or physics toys. They’re fun stress relievers and generally cool little apps to pass any brief period of time you have to kill in a relaxing way, like when you’re standing in line and want to keep yourself from throttling the woman ahead of you who’s paying for a $3.50 latte in loose pennies that have all taken up residence in different, often secluded parts of her purse.
iDayDream is just one such toy that I happen to really like, and it lets you do nothing so ambitious as draw clouds in the sky with your finger. As you draw, they begin to drift lazily by, slowly spreading and changing shape as real clouds are wont to do, all to the sound of wind and bird calls in the background. It’s hard to get any more Zen than that.
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App Name: RhinoBall
Developer: AvatarLabs
Category: Racing Games
It used to be that movie tie-in games cost $40+, had no demos available, and could only hide the fact they sucked really badly just long enough to get you to buy and leave the store with it. (Now, I’m talking back in the 80s and 90s here) The full magnitude of their glowing suckitude usually hit you in the face about two minutes after loading it. Buyer’s Remorse was pretty big in those days when it came to branded software.
It’s interesting then that the product tie-ins I’m seeing on the mobile platform have generally been free. Most of them have still sucked, granted, or at least were quite firmly meh. But then there’s RhinoBall.
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App Name: Trace
Developer: Kevin Calderone
Category: Platform Games
Taking its cue from the likes of such Flash games as Line Rider, Coaster Rider, Draw Play, and loads of other variants, Trace is another drawing game where the object is to draw your own path from point A to point B while avoiding obstacles and navigating existing platforms.
Graphically it’s pretty simple — but such drawing games are generally intended to be, since they’re all meant to resemble chalk or crayon or pencil drawings. Trace is no different, looking like simple marker or pencil crayon drawings by a 4-year-old. The sound is simple but cool — the background music is retrotastic. The gameplay is similarly easy: Draw lines up and around obstacles wherever possible, then use the arrow keys (left) and jump button (right triangle) to navigate your drawing. You can erase lines you’ve drawn if you don’t like where you put them, and there are buttons to restart a level or go back to the main menu. (These last two buttons must be double-tapped, which is a good idea since it avoids accidental taps.)
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App Name: Puzzle Thema ME iPFree
Developer: ME iApps
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games [Hall of FAIL Inductee]
THIS IS ABSOLUTELY GREAT FUN AND NEVER GETS BORING. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY GREAT FUN AND NEVER GETS BORING. APPLY DIRECTLY TO FOREHEAD.
So sayeth the game’s description. Twice. (Minus the caps and the forehead part. But it should have.) A free game that has to try this hard to convince you to download it because it is ABSOLUTELY GREAT FUN AND NEVER GETS BORING can’t be packing the good stuff. But let’s try going at this in a different way, why don’t we? I’m going to assign it a full deck of 5 stars to start with, and for each aspect of this game that ticks me off, I’m going to deduct stars based on the degree to which it ticks me off.
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App Name: JellyCar
Developer: Walaber
Category: Games: Casual
I am amazed at the sheer number of games that have been released in the App Store lately — and not just the number, but the quality. There have been so many good freebies released in the last week that quite frankly, heaping this much praise on so many titles in such a short period of time feels … alien. I mean, I’m having to be nice more than nasty. What a world, what a world…
So that brings me to Walaber’s JellyCar. Fans of casual games everywhere almost certainly remember this one. It ranked right up there with Crayon Physics in terms of casual physics games, but this one went in the opposite direction and aimed for a soft-bodied physics model to give players the feeling that everything was made with … well, jelly — and therein lay its charm and addictiveness. No longer were you sure of the rules of physics where rigid body models acted predictably. Now you had a vehicle and objects that wiggled and wobbled and bounced all over the place. In that regard it shares some genes with the classic Bike or Die on the Palm platform, which was one of my favourites. (Which, I should mention, got its cues from the originator of the sub-genre, Elasto Mania, but I enjoyed Bike or Die much more.)
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App Name: iBall3D
Developer: StoneTrip
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
The traditional Labyrinth puzzle presented in 3D. It’s actually quite well done. You can play in the traditional overhead mode, or you can tap the magnifying glass in the top-right to switch to an angled side view for a different perspective on things. This seems to be a first version that will eventually contain more levels, and I suspect that version will probably end up being commercial. Still, this version has 3 levels and 3 levels of difficulty. Visually, the graphics are very nice indeed, and it’s fun getting to view it all in 3D. The psychedelic tie-died ball on the first board was a bit much though, but that’s a rather small complaint and one of personal taste anyway. It changes on boards 2 and 3 anyway. Some nice sound effects and music, too. Everything here is so well done that even if you’re bored of Labyrinth games, it makes you want to play it again.
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App Name: Cooliris
Developer: Cooliris, Inc.
Category: Entertainment
Here’s one I wasn’t expecting. In its original incarnation, Cooliris is a plugin for Firefox that lets you browse images across the web from Google Image Search, Flickr, and others, using a 3D “image wall” you can scroll through, tap on to view images, and even visit the originating pages. It has recently introduced embedded ads in the form of images ads, movie trailers and other video ads, so it’s clearly found its business model — but it’s still pretty cool. It lets you search using keywords or has a “discover” mode that’ll pick images from a list of topics.
Now they’ve gone and made a native standalone iPhone version, and I have to say, it’s pretty damn, uh… cool. You get the same photo wall as the desktop plugin, complete with pinch zooming, and you can scroll through the wall with a finger as per normal, or tilt your device left and right to auto-scroll. Tap on an image and it’ll raise it from the wall and give you a larger, clearer view with textual details and the ability to send the image via E-Mail. Tap again and it goes full screen with a hideable details overlay and pinch zooming and swipe to navigate to next/previous image. Where the details overlay is displayed you can tap on the details to display the originating web page through an embedded Safari browser — no need to jump out of Cooliris. It searches Google, Flickr, Yahoo, SmutMug and DeviantArt for its images, there’s a vast array of imagery to discover and search for.
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App Name: Fantasy Puzzle
Developer: DS Effects
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games [Hall of FAIL Inductee]
Honestly, DS Effects must create all of their iPhone games by mashing repeatedly on the Easy Button, sticking the results in their back pocket, then forgetting about them when they do their laundry, discovering them only when they’re putting the clean clothes away and notice a raggedy, faded scrap of something poking a dog-eared corner out of a pair of jeans as if to say, “Please kill me.” Then they remove it, try and smooth out the crinkles and colour in the faded bits as best they can with the worn nubs of old crayons, put clear tape on the torn bits, and finally post the sorry mess to the App Store with a shrug.
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App Name: Touch Hockey: FS5
Developer: FlipSide5
Category: Sports Games
You want some air hockey? Well, you’re about to get a face full of it whether you like it or not, and you have newcomers FlipSide5 to thank for it.
Don’t worry though, because Touch Hockey is actually good. Very good, in fact — I haven’t had this much fun with virtual air hockey since Shufflepuck Cafe. (To be fair though, I still like Shufflepuck better, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has ever played it.)
To look at it, it is very much your standard game of air hockey. Blue paddle against red paddle on the field of air with hockey markings on a perforated board. But this is air hockey — every inch of it. The puck makes satisfying clack noises when it smacks against the paddles or the sides of the arena, and a familiar clunk when it drops into a goal — whereupon you’ll hear slightly less familiar cheering and a buzzer indicating a goal. If you make a particularly good shot, you’ll be treated to a close-up instant replay.
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App Name: WritePad
Developer: Stan Miasnikov
Category: Productivity
Here’s one from the Windows Mobile scene, come to grace the iPhone and iPod Touch. Back in my WinMo days there existed a suite of textual applications from PhatWare, which included PhatPad and PhatNotes, two of what I would consider the essential apps for any WinMo users.
PhatWare’s main product was actually the thing that drove these apps: Calligrapher, their advanced handwriting recognition engine which allowed you to write on the screen in natural block letters or cursive script, whichever you felt more comfortable with. So scrawled, PhatWare’s engine would convert the handwriting to plain text and insert it into whatever you were writing in at the time.
It was surprisingly effective and regognized everything I threw at it with few errors. I was quite impressed with it, hence it being filed under “essentials” when it came to what any good upstanding Windows Mobile device should have installed on it.
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App Name: Skyscape Medical Resources
Developer: Skyscape
Category: Health & Fitness
Medical apps, and in particular medical calculators seem to be all the rage these days. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — it’s good to see the iPhone making inroads in high powered professions, so the more the merrier, really — as long as they aren’t crap, of course. Words to live by.
So far most of the medical apps have been relatively single-purpose — a medical calculator, 3D imager, OB/GYN tools, etc. This one however reaches out to a number of disciplines of medicine to deliver a vast array of resources to the fingertips of physicians, nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, EMT/EMS providers, medical/nursing students, or just about any other health care professional.
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App Name: Alpha3D Photo Puzzle Platinum
Developer: Impact Financials, Inc.
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games [Hall of FAIL Inductee]
At first sight, this looked like an interesting twist on the old jigsaw puzzle genre. Alpha3D Photo Puzzle Does the usual jigsaw puzzle, though without the indents and tabs around the edges, opting instead for perfectly square pieces, and shoves them forcibly in to 3D. Start by choosing easy, medium or hard, which determines the number of pieces the puzzle will be broken into. Then, it’s time to solve — and that’s where it gets weird.
First of all you are given a time limit within which you must solve the puzzle. Not so bad, right? Except that while you play, the puzzle is gently lurching to and fro, listing side to side, and overall behaving like a balloon in the breeze, so while you’ve got a piece picked up, the puzzle is actively trying to avoid you.
Speaking of picking up pieces, that part works well enough — except that when you slide it around the puzzle to pick a place to put it, all of the pieces you’re sliding it over get knocked unceremoniously out of place. So displaced, the airborne pieces will fly out toward you in a generally haphazard manner before eventually settling back in place — in different locations than the ones they were displaced from. If you had your eye on a few pieces and a good idea of where to put them, you’ll have to hunt for them all over again if you knocked them out of place while moving your previous piece. Besides being annoying and wasting your time hunting for those pieces again, you have to wait for the pieces to settle down before you can pick them up again, which only further wastes your time. I wouldn’t care if they were quick about it, but the damn things float lazily in the virtual air for 4 FULL SECONDS before coming down to rest. Yes, I timed it.
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App Name: Answers
Developer: Xtreme Labs Inc.
Category: Social Networking
Now here’s a nice, practical use for a social networking app. Answers is similar to LinkedIn, in that it is designed to be a personal braintrust where you can throw out a question that you need an answer to, and hopefully, someone knowledgeable about the subject will respond with an answer. Unlike LinkedIn, this is aimed at the broader segment of the general public who want answers to a wider range of questions that aren’t necessarily related to their profession.
Questions can be asked through the selection of a variety of topics, and any number of people can answer them. Answers can be voted up or down by other users, so you can see who has voted for the best answer and use that as a kind of straw poll as to which one is the best. Of course, you always need to keep in mind that you’re asking questions of the hoi polloi, and they may not be wholly accurate. It’s more or less the equivalent of asking people in a bar to settle a bet for you over the answer to a particular question — though hopefully with less inebriation and more coherency.
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App Name: Numba Lite
Developer: I-play
Category: Games: Logic & Puzzle
At first glance this game doesn’t really look like much — in fact, it looks like some kind of Sudoku variant. I hate Sudoku. Fortunately I don’t have to hate Numba, because it’s nothing to do with Sudoku. It’s a puzzle style game that has just a hint of Bookworm or Boggle, but manages to be quite a different game altogether.
The object is simple: Use your finger to connect adjacent numbers to form strings of 3 or more numbers within a specific rule set to eliminate them from the board. The rules for matching are fairly broad: You can match strings of like numbers (all 3s, for example), straight runs (1-2-3, 4-3-2, etc.), odd or even number runs (2-4-6, 7-5-3, etc.), doubles or halves of the prior runs (1-2-4-8, 8-4-2, etc.), or sequence runs (2-5-8 (each number is 3 more than the prior), 9-5-1 (each number is 4 less than the prior), etc.). Any sequence can be matched in either direction.
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App Name: iDicto
Developer: DAVA Consulting
Category: Business
For those of you who find it easier to take voice notes, or who merely want to record either something, be it the melody or lyrics for a song idea, a lecture, or whatever, DAVA have come out with a very impressive voice recorder that they’re offering on promo for free, which is right in my price range.
What’s even better is that iDicto is actually quite a fantastic app, as voice recorders go. It’s feature-rich, configurable, functional, and quite pleasing to look at besides. To start with, you can choose to record in either low quality 8KHz mode, medium quality 22KHz mode (half CD quality) or full CD quality 44.1KHz. Obviously, file sizes increase as quality increases, but the quality is quite good at CD quality. 8KHz sounds like it would if you were dictating over the phone, but 44KHz naturally sounds exceptionally clear.
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App Name: Lux Touch
Developer: Sillysoft Games
Category: Strategy Games
Sillysoft’s Lux Delux has been around for some time as a cross-platform world domination game in the tradition of Risk. Now they’ve come to the iPhone to port their most excellent strategy game and bring it to you for your troop deploying pleasure.
Lux Touch is a very faithful port that follows quite closely to the desktop version, but is optimized for the small screen and touch interface. The game iself plays very much like the Risk you’ve always known, with the attack and fortification phases, and there are some nice sound effects and animated explosions when countries and regions attack one another. An interesting visual gauge is added here that is shown as an undulating coloured bar representive of the various warring factions’ strength, and the iPhone/Touch version has a nice little at-a-glance overlay in the lower left that shows everyone’s vitals. Another way in which this differs from Risk is that you get bonus cards redeemable for troops whenever you hold an entire country. The more countries you hold, the more bonus cards you get, and therefore the more bonus troops you get each round, which gives you further advantage in taking over more countries.
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App Name: Hiqup Lite
Developer: Moopf
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
Some days I love the App Store. This is one of those days. Not one, but three superb games have found there way in. I’ll start with the amusingly named Moopf (say it, just say it — Moopf!) and their brilliant twist on the classic Peg Solitaire, which they call Hiqup.
Hiqup takes your basic Peg Solitaire gameplay — jump one peg over another until you have only one left, if at all possible — and puts an enormous logic game spin on it. For starters, there are three different types of pegs, each with their own movement properties. Blue pegs can move horizontally or vertically. Blue pegs can only move on diagonals. Red pegs can move every which way but loose. (Cue Eddie Rabbitt) Throw in loads of unconventional level layouts. Sprinkle liberally with special board pieces, such as jumpers your pegs can jump over at any time, bombs that clear all pegs that surround it, black holes that eat pegs, and teleports. Add dashes of different level goals, such as jumping pieces into special designated squares (ala Sokoban) or finishing with no pegs left or beating the clock. Now wrap it all up in stylish, clean, soothing, frankly brilliant graphics, animated yet unobtrusive backgrounds, and clean, effective sounds. Viola! One order of Hiqup to go.
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App Name: Tilt Meter Lite
Developer:IntegraSoft
Category: Utilities
I know what you’re thinking. “I could really go for a burger right now.” But also, “Another level? You can’t be serious.” Matter of fact, I am serious, and the fact that I haven’t already ripped IntegraSoft three new ones before the first sentence hit a period should tell you that this is no ordinary level.
Tilt Meter is in fact two levels in one, and as soft levels go, it is remarkably good. I think I can even comfortably declare that this is hands down the best level in the App Store. Used perpendicular to the ground, Tilt Meter functions just as its name describes, as a tilt meter that measures degrees of angle along any axis. Set it flat though and it becomes a two axis bubble level (or a radar scope, maybe, if you pretend hard enough that you’re searching for Red October).
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App Name: Gaia Lite
Developer: Quicksand Interactive
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
Gaia has been around for a while, but I do believe this is the first playable demo I’ve seen of it. Gaia is a fairly literal twist on the classic SameGame concept. The object is as always to group as many like objects together to eliminate the largest block possible to score the most points. Like some variants, more pieces drop in when you clear some away, but in Gaia you can also rotate the device around to change the direction of gravity, which will shove loose pieces together and cause new pieces to drop from whichever way is up. There are a few extra pieces here — hazards that can get in your way or cause problems; those you can’t eliminate, but must drop off an edge of the screen. When pieces are grouped together, they merge seamlessly into a solid construct, which is rather well-done.
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So there you have it. A hand-picked digest of some of the good and bad from the App Store this october, straight from the annals (that’s two N’s, people) of Frapstr, the now-well settled Free App Store Review. It’s been fun so far, if a bit slow at times due to the primary focus on our super secret Project: Awesome, but we do what we can when we can. If this digest just doesn’t contain enough condensed cool, head on over to Frapstr for the whole enchelada.
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Posted in Application Related, Free App Store Review, Gaming Related, Productivity Apps, Round Ups, app store
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