Evan Killham - page 27

Barrels have been a staple of video games at least since Donkey Kong used them in his vain attempts to ward off a small, mustachioed man with a penchant for jumping.

What’s the deal with barrels? Is it that they’re easy to draw? Or fun to destroy? Or is it that their size and purpose provide a wealth of possibilities, their wooden or metal frames metaphors for the endless potential that lies within all of us, just waiting for someone to pry off the lid and share our special gifts with the world? Or something else less ridiculous?

Whatever the reason, barrels are awesome, and Tap & Blast, a fun aerial platformer of sorts out now for iOS devices, flipping loves them.

Relaxatron — Entertainment — Free

People keep telling me I’m too highly strung, which is probably why I keep finding relaxation apps to write up. It might also be why I just yelled at my TV for 15 minutes for refusing to contain any episodes of Quantum Leap.

Anyway, Relaxatron has two things going for it: a badass name and a little more interaction than some of those other calming apps. You create a “seed shape” by placing dots into a grid, and then you just tap the screen and watch calming patterns emerge, and …

That was two hours ago.

Relaxatron

1981’s Qix is one of those games that just won’t die. It’s come out in its original form no fewer than four times, most recently in the Nintendo 3DS handheld’s retro-game marketplace Virtual Console in 2011 (in Japan, anyway). I’ve also seen versions of it as minigames in titles like Bully. It’s a long-lived game with a lot of versions.

And here’s another one.

Line Knight Fortix is a new variation on the old territory-capturing game with a medieval skin including dragons, ogres, and castles. The same basic idea of carving out and capturing territory before enemies cross your path and kill you remains, but you can also unlock weapons and generally just run around being all knightly and cool.

It has a couple playability issues, but it’s mostly decent.

52 Weeks Money Challenge — Finance — Free

If you haven’t heard of the 52 Weeks Money Challenge, you probably don’t have a Facebook account. And I envy you for that.

Anyway, the challenge is a way to help you build up a nest egg through regimented saving. You put away one dollar the first week, two dollars the second, and so on. At the end of 52 weeks, you’ve set aside a total of $1,378. This app tracks your progress and grand total, and it will even send you weekly reminders in case you’re the forgetful type.

52 Weeks Money Challenge

Let’s take a minute to address the fact that I’m not really sure how to pronounce the title of this game. Is it “B-ombs,” or is it, “Buh-buh-buh-bombs”? My money’s on the second one, and now that we’ve sorted that out, the review can begin.

‘Bombs’ with Too Many Letters is a puzzle-ish game that tasks you with clearing a ridiculous lab of the now-sentient explosives that are now buzzing around all willy-nilly. You do this with plain, stupid, regular bombs. You get three blast per level, and you can set up chain reactions to clear a bunch of what science hath wrought in one shot.

Meanwhile, this game is hilarious.

Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?

Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a quick slide-show creator, an app that will help you snag some wheels, and more data than you require.

Here you go:

Presentics — Productivity — Free ($9.99 unlock)

If you have a presentation to prepare at the last minute or you think PowerPoint is too clunky, you might want to look at Presentics. It’s an iPad app that will help you make a minimalist slide show quickly and easily. It just takes a few taps and some typing, and you’ll have a quick, clean project. You can also embed images, audio, and video right inside the app if you want to go all multimedia on it.

You have access to everything in the free version, but the $9.99 unlock lets you save more than two projects and share over the cloud.

Presentics

Cold Tires — Utilities — Free

If you prefer to add air to your favorite vehicle’s radials in the comfort of your own garage, you might be interested in Cold Tires. It’s a quick and simple calculator that will automatically compensate for the temperature difference between where you put the air in and where you’ll actually be driving. Meaning outside. Where it’s probably freezing. Because winter.

Just add a few bits of data, and the app will tell you how much extra air to add to make sure the pressure stays where you want it.

Cold Tires

Puzzle Sidekick — Reference — Free

Puzzle Sidekick is an ambitious app that hopes to serve as a reference guide for people who do crosswords, augmented-reality games, puzzle-driven scavenger hunts, and whichever other situations one might need a working knowledge of semaphore.

It also contains guides to codemaking (and breaking), information on our solar system, and a couple dozen other random topics that I can’t even remember right now. So even if you’re not following a puzzle trail anytime soon, it’s still an interesting collection of random information that’s worth a look.

Puzzle Sidekick

Legítimo — Productivity — Free

Sometimes, it’s a good idea to get something in writing, like if you and your roommate agree to split utilities in exchange for the right to have pizza and wear Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. Crucial dealings like those are the sorts of things you bring ink and paper in on. But what if you don’t know how to speak Official-Sounding Legal Document?

Legítimo is here to help. You can use it to draw up loan agreements, leases, sales and purchases, and service contracts and even sign them in the app. And everyone gets a copy via e-mail or text.

Also, help me figure out which category that utilities/Pizza Day deal falls under. No reason.

Legítimo

Bykes — Travel — Free

Bike-sharing programs are popping up all over the world now, and here’s an app to help you navigate some of them. Bykes will help you find stations for 11 bike fleets in five countries (more to come). In addition to just showing you where the depots are, it will also tell you how many bikes are there and how many stalls are available for those looking to return their borrowed wheels.

So if you live in — or are visiting — Dublin, London, Brisbane, Melbourne, Boulder, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, the District of Columbia, Montreal, or Toronto, you’re all set. If not, just wait or drive, I guess.

Bykes

Bykes — Travel — Free

Bike-sharing programs are popping up all over the world now, and here’s an app to help you navigate some of them. Bykes will help you find stations for 11 bike fleets in five countries (more to come). In addition to just showing you where the depots are, it will also tell you how many bikes are there and how many stalls are available for those looking to return their borrowed wheels.

So if you live in — or are visiting — Dublin, London, Brisbane, Melbourne, Boulder, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, the District of Columbia, Montreal, or Toronto, you’re all set. If not, just wait or drive, I guess.

Bykes

Fans of word games are always looking out for new apps that will let them arrange letters and clear blocks or cross things or whatever else people do when they’re using text as game pieces. Here’s another game that lets you do that.

It’s called Alpha 9, and it’s basically Boggle plus Tetris. Your goal is to form words of at least three letters in order to clear lines from a board to keep the letter blocks dropping from the ceiling from piling up to the top of the screen.

That’s Wall Mode, anyway. It has another game type, but they’re both pretty average.

Legítimo — Productivity — Free

Sometimes, it’s a good idea to get something in writing, like if you and your roommate agree to split utilities in exchange for the right to have pizza and Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. Crucial dealings like those are the sorts of things you bring ink and paper in on. But what if you don’t know how to speak Official-Sounding Legal Document?

Legítimo is here to help. You can use it to draw up loan agreements, leases, sales and purchases, and service contracts and even sign them in the app. And everyone gets a copy via e-mail or text.

Also, help me figure out which category that utilities/Pizza Day deal falls under. No reason.

Legítimo

If you’re used to games taking time to explain what they are and how you play them, then Simian Interface may not be for you.

But you should play it anyway, wuss, because you don’t need that much instruction to understand this one. The game leaves it up to you to figure out what it wants and how to do it, but it’s really not that hard to figure out.

And if you put the time in and go along for the short time it takes to play through it, you’ll get a unique, entirely satisfying experience.

Puzzle Sidekick — Reference — Free

Puzzle Sidekick is an ambitious app that hopes to serve as a reference guide for people who do crosswords, augmented-reality games, puzzle-driven scavenger hunts, and whichever other situations one might need a working knowledge of semaphore.

It also contains guides to codemaking (and breaking), information on our solar system, and a couple dozen other random topics that I can’t even remember right now. So even if you’re not following a puzzle trail anytime soon, it’s still an interesting collection of random information that’s worth a look.

Puzzle Sidekick

Cold Tires — Utilities — Free

If you prefer to add air to your favorite vehicle’s radials in the comfort of your own garage, you might be interested in Cold Tires. It’s a quick and simple calculator that will automatically compensate for the temperature difference between where you put the air in and where you’ll actually be driving. Meaning outside. Where it’s probably freezing. Because winter.

Just add a few bits of data, and the app will tell you how much extra air to add to make sure the pressure stays where you want it.

Cold Tires

Apparently, I’m a sucker for minimalist puzzle games.

You can find a lot of them in the App Store, and I’ve reviewed more than a few since I’ve been here. I like the simplicity, the clean interface, the solid blocks of color … it’s all very relaxing. And then I play something like Lyne, a new puzzler that looks like those other zen games, but then you start playing it and realize that beneath its sparsely populated surface is a relentless battle for your sanity.

In a good way. Mostly.

One of the first video games I ever finished was 1985’s Kung Fu, a port of a Japanese arcade game (Kung Fu Master)for the original Nintendo system. It was a side-scrolling beat ’em up about a guy fighting through five floors of a goon-filled building to rescue his girlfriend, and even though it’s probably not nearly as good as I remember, it’ll always have a special place in my nostalgia bank because I was so good at it back then.

Fightback is a new free-to-play fighter from developer Ninja Theory (makers of super-shiny console games like the PlayStation 3’s Heavenly Sword and the recent reboot of Devil May Cry), and it’s basically an updated version of Kung Fu. It even has the same 2D gameplay and girlfriend-rescuing premise and graphics and music that call back ridiculous action films from the ’80s.

So needless to say, I like this game a lot.

Presentics — Productivity — Free ($9.99 unlock)

If you have a presentation to prepare at the last minute or you think PowerPoint is too clunky, you might want to look at Presentics. It’s an iPad app that will help you make a minimalist slide show quickly and easily. It just takes a few taps and some typing, and you’ll have a quick, clean project. You can also embed images, audio, and video right inside the app if you want to go all multimedia on it.

You have access to everything in the free version, but the $9.99 unlock lets you save more than two projects and share over the cloud.

Presentics

It’s been a little while since I reviewed a tank game, so I picked up Battle Supremacy, a new tread-and-turret action title from the developers of Sky Gamblers out today for iOS devices.

Battle Supremacy takes place during World War II and features authentic vehicles and locations. It’ll have you participating in campaigns in both the European and Pacific Theaters. If you can stop firing long enough to look around, you’ll see birds in the sky and fish in the water. And you can run over absolutely anything that gets in your way. It’s an action-packed, detailed game with incredible graphics.

And honestly, I thought it was kind of boring and clunky.

Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?

Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a self-improvement program that wants to save you time, a guide to how to properly brush your teeth, and a timer with a beat.

Here you go:

Better Every Time — Productivity — Free

The App Store is full of things to help you set goals and keep you accountable, usually by making everything visible to your friends so they can goad you into persevering. Better Every Time takes a different approach, offering no social media connectivity whatsoever. Instead, it turns your quest of betterment into a journey to the top of a mountain and leaves it to you to check in along the way. Doing so just takes a few seconds, leaving you free to improve yourself.

So it’s basically an app that doesn’t want you to use it too much, which is an interesting angle.

Better Every Time

Swear Jar — Lifestyle — Free

In these troubled economic times, we don’t really have the luxury of putting real coins into a jar every time we drop a bomb in front of Grandma. Luckily, we have Swear Jar, a virtual container you can drop change into so you can quantify your dirty mouth. You can use any denomination of change you want, and it’ll keep a running tab of your blue streak. It even has motion controls so that you can jingle the coins around.

Because you have to do something between curses, right?

Swear Jar

Simple Additives — Health & Fitness — $0.99 (lite version available)

Food labels can be scary places. Reading the ingredients of whatever you’ve just crammed into your gob can be confusing or even the worst decision you’ve made all day. I don’t know how to keep the stuff in your food from terrifying you, but for those perplexing moments, try Simple Additives. It’s an app that will tell you what those unpronounceable things in your snack do and also whether or not they’ve been linked to cancer or harmful side effects.

I don’t know if I’m really doing you a favor by pointing you toward this, though. Everything’s tasted like poison for like three hours now.

Simple Additives

MyTeeth — Education — Free ($1.99 unlock)

It’s important for people to learn proper tooth-brushing techniques, and not just because toothpaste and floss are way cheaper than root canals and fillings. Brushing is just an important part of fitting in with society because society is full of people who will notice if you have broccoli stuck in your teeth or if your breath smells like the inside of a garbage disposal.

MyTeeth is here to help with a selection of slightly creepy-looking children who will brush along with your kids — or you — to ensure that your chompers get nice and clean. Just don’t stare into their beady little eyes too long. I think I saw Cthulhu in there.

MyTeeth

Humming Timing — Utilities — Free

I’ve featured timers here before, but this is one you should definitely check out.

Humming Timing looks at other time-keeping apps and wonders why they have to be so quiet. Its solution: to make a countdown using music from your iPhone’s library. So for example, you’ll put your cake in the oven, set the app for 35 minutes, and it will craft an exactly 35-minute-long playlist from your tunes and tell you which song to listen for for the end.

It’s basically a timer you can dance to. If that’s something you’ve been looking for.

Humming Timing

Humming Timing — Utilities — Free

I’ve featured timers here before, but this is one you should definitely check out.

Humming Timing looks at other time-keeping apps and wonders why they have to be so quiet. Its solution: to make a countdown using music from your iPhone’s library. So for example, you’ll put your cake in the oven, set the app for 35 minutes, and it will craft an exactly 35-minute-long playlist from your tunes and tell you which song to listen for for the end.

It’s basically a timer you can dance to. If that’s something you’ve been looking for.

Humming Timing

Episode One of developer Sunside’s six-part, hybrid adventure series is out now in the App Store, and it’s a promising start.

Abducted pulls from a variety of genres to build its sci-fi world and mechanics, including point-and-click (and text!) adventures, role-playing games, and even survival horror. It’s also a really good-looking game with an intriguing setting and enough mysteries to keep you moving on to see what’s next.

And if you have a device that can play it, you’ll enjoy it quite a lot.

MyTeeth — Education — Free ($1.99 unlock)

It’s important for people to learn proper tooth-brushing techniques, and not just because toothpaste and floss are way cheaper than root canals and fillings. Brushing is just an important part of fitting in with society because society is full of people who will notice if you have broccoli stuck in your teeth or if your breath smells like the inside of a garbage disposal.

MyTeeth is here to help with a selection of slightly creepy-looking children who will brush along with your kids — or you — to ensure that your chompers get nice and clean. Just don’t stare into their beady little eyes too long. I think I saw Cthulhu in there.

MyTeeth

Simple Additives — Health & Fitness — $0.99 (lite version available)

Food labels can be scary places. Reading the ingredients of whatever you’ve just crammed into your gob can be confusing or even the worst decision you’ve made all day. I don’t know how to keep the stuff in your food from terrifying you, but for those perplexing moments, try Simple Additives. It’s an app that will tell you what those unpronounceable things in your snack do and also whether or not they’ve been linked to cancer or harmful side effects.

I don’t know if I’m really doing you a favor by pointing you toward this, though. Everything’s tasted like poison for like three hours now.

Simple Additives

If you played the original Feed Me Oil a couple years ago, you probably fell in love with its surreal graphics and fun, physics-based puzzles. If you didn’t, the name is probably confusing the hell out of you. Because you really shouldn’t feed anything oil, right? That’s super gross.

Don’t get stuck on that, though, because Feed Me Oil 2 is out now, and it features the same addictive gameplay with shinier graphics and some new tools to get that oil where it needs to go.

And where it needs to go is, like, right into the mouth of a weird, animal-like hill or something. But again, don’t dwell on that because if you do, you’re missing out on a great game.

Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?

Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include something to keep you up-to-date on late-night TV, a creepy virtual boyfriend, and an app to help you randomly name your baby.

Here you go:

Late Night Talk Show Review — Entertainment — Free ($0.99 Upgrade)

If you missed your favorite late-night talk show, and you’re jonesing for a monologue, a Top 10 List, or whatever the hell Jay Leno does, you might want to pick up Late Night Talk Show Review. It collects video clips from 11 shows (and an assortment of things from Comedy Central) and updates them regularly. So if people are still gathering around water coolers these days, you will be all set to discuss that funny thing that Conan said.

I don’t know — my office just got a water cooler recently. I don’t really know how this whole thing works yet.

Late Night Talk Show Review

PocketBoy — Entertainment — Free

PocketBoy was the developer’s idea to keep his girlfriend from feeling lonely when he was away. It’s a blank virtual “doll” that you can slap your loved one’s face on and listen to it say adoring things in a not-at-all creepy robot voice. It’s endearing in a way that I can’t quite figure out, and the different “play” modes are pretty cute. I’m not sure what the whole “Frog Mode” bit is all about — “There is no Frog Mode, silly” — but even that’s pretty cute.

This app is cute. I admit it.

PocketBoy.

Name My Baby! — Lifestyle — Free

Unless you have some amazing relatives you were close to and to whom you want to pay tribute, naming a baby is hard. And not just for the reasons outlined in this amazing Saturday Night Live sketch where Nicolas Cage reveals that cruel schoolchildren can make fun of any name you can come up with. Name My Baby hopes to take the stress out of the whole ordeal by randomly generating first and middle names for both boys and girls. And even if you aren’t expecting, it’s kind of entertaining to see some of the combinations it comes up with.

Name My Baby!

Swear Jar — Lifestyle — Free

In these troubled economic times, we don’t really have the luxury of putting real coins into a jar every time we drop a bomb in front of Grandma. Luckily, we have Swear Jar, a virtual container you can drop change into so you can quantify your dirty mouth. You can use any denomination of change you want, and it’ll keep a running tab of your blue streak. It even has motion controls so that you can jingle the coins around.

Because you have to do something between curses, right?

Swear Jar

Interactive zombie film series The Hunting is back with its third installment, which has you continuing to make life-threatening choices and furiously tapping on your screen to run and fight off crazed undead who want to put the nom on you.

It’s another creepy, high-tension experience that will quickly make you regret playing it with headphones and/or in the dark, both of which I did because I clearly don’t know what’s good for me.

But while the game is still completely scary and harrowing as ever, it fails to build on Part 2’s impressive shotgun blast of terror and what-the-hell-ery.