Reviews - page 108

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.

My friends and family love Pad & Quill cases, mostly because Brian, the P&Q founder, keeps sending me cases to review, and I keep testing them for a month or so and then giving them away.

The Luxury Pocket Book is another of the bookbindery iPhone cases, this time with an absurdly luxurious list of materials (hence the name I guess). It’s also likely to cause fights to break out amongst my family and friends as they battle for ownership.

The only reason I picked up Disco Bees to play today was the name. I’m really rather tired of the match-three dynamic, but I figured cute bees and disco music was a good combo to try, regardless.

What I found was a compelling match-three game that does indeed have the same mechanics as many other free-to-play matching games, like Candy Crush or Dragon Academy. In addition, however, it’s got amazingly adorable dancing bees and a killer soundtrack that does fantastic justice to the disco genre without using licensed music.

Did I mention cute dancing bees? You really need more? Fine.

I have a bit of a soft spot for Loop Attachment’s Mummy cases; I’ve reviewed them for iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, and the iPad mini — and I’ve loved them all. But the collection wasn’t complete without the Mummy case for the full-size iPad, which went on sale back in August.

Like its siblings, the new case is made from a soft coated silicone that is designed to protect your iPad from any dings, drops, scuffs, or scratches that it might encounter while you’re using it. But it’s not just a plain old silicone case — the Mummy is different.

The thing that sets it apart from the cheap silicone cases you’ll find on eBay for a few dollars is that it has a special coating that not only makes it super soft and smooth, but also prevents it from collecting dirt and grime. It also has a unique design that shows off the Apple logo on the back of your device.

Furthermore, the Mummy is compatible with your Apple Smart Cover, which isn’t a common trait with third-party cases. So not only does it protect the back of your device, but with the help of your Smart Cover, it protects its Retina display, too.

The Mummy for iPad is priced at $40, and it’s available in black, blue, graphite, red, white, and my favorite, teal.

Gaming headsets are quite the rage lately, with products from Turtle Beach, Logitech, and Sony gracing any decent gaming aisle at your favorite retailer.

SteelSeries has a long history of providing high quality gaming peripherals, like mice, keyboards, and controllers, for the high-end PC gaming market. They’ve recently made some fantastic forays into iOS gaming peripherals, as well, like the SteelSeries Free controller for iPad and iPhone.

These Siberia Elites, then, have a fantastic pedigree at a fairly competitive price, and I’ve fallen in love with their sound, build quality, and fancy extras.

Some games just aren’t meant for touch screens, and it’s very unfortunate that The Cave is one of them. In developer Double Fine’s dark look at inner desires and magical caves, you guide three of the seven available “heroes” through a labyrinthian network of tunnels that slowly unveil each character’s inner corruption.

Its fantastic-yet-eerie atmosphere and stellar narration definitely translates well to portable screens, but the lack of physical controls or even on-screen button prompts is a serious issue.

In a world overrun with endless runners, it’s nice to see a cheery little beat-em-up among their number. Nakama is the delightfully colorful quest of a ninja rescuing his friends from bad guys then teaming up with them to take on even bigger, badder dudes ahead.

Nakama is yet another faux-retro style brawler, complete with pixel graphics. The use of color sets it apart from most, however. Splashes of brilliant greens and vibrant pinks set a whimsical tone as you slash through hordes of baddies. When you fall in battle, you can even ride a cloud back to your last location, Dragon Ball-style.

Hidden object games don’t usually catch my fancy, to be honest. I’ve never been a big fan of the mechanics, which typically require you to find objects to then reveal other objects, which can then be combined to become actual useful objects. I’ve also never been too taken by the typical romanticized story lines, either.

Big Fish’s new game, developed by India-based IronCode Games, Pahelika Secret Legends has found a way to convince me otherwise,t hough, and I find myself being drawn back to playing it often. There’s a fairly interesting story, and the puzzles are tough enough to provide a challenge without busting a brain.

If you’re like me and have been ambivalent about trying a game like this out, perhaps this is the one to start with.

When role-playing game heroes die, I suspect Puzzle Dungeon is what their hell looks like. Plodding music, 60 progressively tricky puzzles, and a bare-bones presentation, Puzzle Dungeon gives you a glimpse at the unpleasant side of the 16-bit afterlife.

If you’re familiar with games like Chew Man Fu, The Adventures of Lolo, and all those generic block-pushing programs on old cell phones, you’ll immediately know how to play Puzzle Dungeon.

The adventure-game genre has two salient qualities: puzzles and story. I’ve played titles with great puzzles and crappy stories, and I’ve played ones with amazing stories and awful, boring puzzles. I’ve even played some in which both the puzzles and plots were great, and some where they were both bad. There may be some kind of permutation formula at work here, but that’s not important.

Brightstone Mysteries: Paranormal Hotel‘s story and puzzles are neither great nor terrible; it is completely average across the board. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth playing if you need an adventure fix, but it probably shouldn’t be your first choice especially since something like seven Monkey Island games are currently available in the App Store.

Regardless, Paranormal Hotel serves its purpose and does what it needs to.

If you’re looking for an ultra-simple dock, or just for a way to stop your iPhone skittering across your desk every time you snap it’s cable, then you might like the Rolio from Blue Lounge. Not only is it one of the most versatile iPhone and iPad charging accessories around, it’s also one of the most affordable.

I’ve applied dozens of screen protectors to my iPhones over the years, and I’d say less than 10% of them actually went on straight. They almost always go on wonky first time, and that means pulling them away and applying them again.

Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about this anymore, because I have the ALIN from TYLT. The ALIN plastic alignment tool that clips into the side of your iPhone 5 or iPhone 5s and ensures that every single screen protector you apply goes on completely straight first time.

It takes the hassle out of the whole process, and it turns a ten-minute job into a two-minute one. And as you might expect, ALIN is reusable, so you can keep hold of it and put it to work every time you need to apply a new screen protector.

ALIN costs $25, and for that you get the alignment tool, plus four screen protectors — three clear ones, and one anti-glare one. Is it worth your money?