Archive for category App Reviews

iPhone Game Review: iDodge: Space Ninja

Apr 30

Posted by Tim Barribeau in App Reviews, Apple iPhone | No Comments

iDodge: Space Ninja ($5.99, link) has some of the best accelerometer controls around and makes use of the iPhone’s tilt controls in a surprisingly precise way. Relying on the accelerometer as the primary method of control for any game can be dodgy if done incorrectly, but Space Ninja does it very well. The game has you navigating mine fields and enemies using only your dodging prowess, controlled by said accelerometer, through a frankly ludicrous number of levels.

Each level is of set vertical length, and you try and dodge a gauntlet of obstacles to cross the finish line. You don’t have any weapons at your disposal, so it’s up to using the accelerometer and some mad agility to avoid incoming attacks from multitudes of enemies. While you may not be armed, you do have some tricks up your sleeve. Pressing and holding on the left side of the screen activates a magnetic field to pull things in, and the right side lets you slow down time, making it easier to dodge. However, every level is apparently beatable without using them, and you get bonus medals if you do so — it’s just freakishly hard.

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iPhone Game Review: Sway

Apr 27

Posted by Tim Barribeau in App Reviews, Apple iPhone | No Comments

Sway ($4.99, link) is a puzzle game for the iPhone that, underneath its simple concept, lies a surprisingly tricky game — one that belies the childish theme of the game.

Sway uses an innovative twist for multitouch controls, with each half of the screen corresponding to one of your characters hands. You play a small, stuffed animal-like monkey with hands that stick to the background. When hanging by just one hand, you swing the character, and lift your thumb to send them flying — but be careful to grab hold of something before you fall to your death.

The object is to make your way Tarzan style across the level, flinging and swinging from platform to platform, avoiding obstacles and barely catching moving sections. Completing each level gives you a rating based on how fast you completed it and the number of stars you collected along the way.

It’s a simple idea and control scheme but surprisingly tricky. It takes a while to learn how to accurately throw the character around, and I spent a huge amount of time plummeting to my death. It’s remarkably hard, and once you throw in hazards and moving platforms, it gets even trickier. If you’re trying to beat each level in the time required to get the medals, you have to master the art of flinging with wild abandon, to move with sufficient speed. Luckily, there’s no penalty for dying, you just start at the most recent checkpoint.

The levels are laid out on a branching path, and as you complete them, you gradually unlock more characters with different attributes. For instance, the first character you unlock has longer arms, but moves more slowly.

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Game Review: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2

Apr 19

Posted by Tim Barribeau in App Reviews, Apple iPhone | 1 Comment

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 ($9.99, link) takes the incredibly successful skating game, and shrinks it down to pocket size, squeezing almost all the functionality of the classic game into its iPhone counterpart.

THPS2 is arguably the best of the series (either it or its immediate sequel), and came long before the poorly regarded recent entries, like Proving Ground or Ride. An immensely well-received game, it sold gangbusters on the PS1, N64, and was one of the few games that would run happily on my old 12-inch Titanium G4.

The Tony Hawk games put you in a series of themed levels, which you skate through, attempting to work through a number of goals for each one. There’s cash scattered around, which is used to buy tricks and increase your stats, hidden tapes, secret rooms, special grinds to be done, and usually some sort of level-specific collectible. On top of that, you want to try and hit various high score amounts. As you pass each level, more open up, including a number of competitions, where you have three runs to rack up as many points as possible. Or you can just play free skate, and bum around to your heart’s content.

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Review: SimCity

Apr 7

Posted by Tim Barribeau in App Reviews, EA | No Comments

Things are not going well in the City of Awesomeville. The population stay off the streets for fear of crime, and when they do, they’re hidden beneath layers of smog. The fire and police departments are completely out of money, and crime is rampant. The city is so far in debt, I consider raising taxes about their already high 20%, but my bobblehead looking advisers all warn of rioting if I do. It turns out my idea of a river-based Airport wasn’t financially viable. I think of creating a sex scandal so I can resign in peace, but I can’t find the menu option for that. This is SimCity ($2.99, link), and I’ve sucked at this game since I was 11.

SimCity for the iPhone is a port of the venerable SimCity 3000, rather than the more recent SimCity 4, and like the rest of the SimCity games, it puts you in charge of a tract of land with the intent of turning it into a bustling metropolis. It’s a juggling act, keeping taxes at the right level without falling into debt, keeping the populace’s demands met, making sure everyone has power and water, and slowly — ever so slowly — expanding.

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Review: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (Best of iPhone Games)

Mar 26

Posted by Tim Barribeau in App Reviews, Apple iPhone, Best iPhone Games, News | No Comments

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars ($9.99, link) is a port of the extremely successful Nintendo DS game, which later found a home on the PSP, and has now wormed its way to the iPhone. What does its portable console origin have to do with anything? Well it means GTA:CW is one of the biggest games I’ve encountered on the iPhone. Seriously, it’s freaking huge! Not only is the story line long, but there are dozens of sidequests, plus a huge city to explore. So while the price is higher than many other games, you’re getting an amount of gameplay not usually seen on the iPhone.

You play the son of a murdered Chinese ganglord, sent to the United States, but ambushed on the way. A nobody on the mean streets of Liberty City, you must work your way up the Triad’s ranks. Steal cars, kill enemies, trade drugs. I’m sure by now everyone knows how GTA games work.

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Review: Top 5 Financial & Investing iPhone Apps

Jan 26

Posted by Alan in App Reviews, Best iPhone Apps, Financial Apps, iPhone Apps With Push Notifications, iPhone Financial Apps | 1 Comment

The iPhone comes with a default Stocks app to track stock prices, but many investors quickly seek an alternative because the app lacks any financial news coverage and its quotes are delayed by 20 minutes. We took a look at the top 5 financial iPhone apps: Yahoo! Finance, MarketWatch, CNBC Real-Time, Bloomberg, and AOL’s DailyFinance, and although each has its own qualities, two stood out from the crowd, CNBC Real-Time and Bloomberg. Below are our reviews for each app, sorted by ranking.

1. CNBC Real-Time

CNBC Real Time (free, iTunes link) is one of our favorite apps because of its slick interface, quality of original video content, useful push notifications, and real-time stock quotes (thus the “Real Time” in its name).

While apps like Bloomberg and MarketWatch offer more text content, Real-Time is all about video, and they do it very well, offering long clips from various CNBC shows. The videos feature important or interesting moments from the CNBC broadcast day, but again, the clips are usually long, usually 8-10 minutes and are almost always worth watching. Real Time does offer text articles too, but they’re somewhat sparse when compared with the other apps.
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Review: Grinchmas

Dec 16

Posted by Tim Barribeau in App Reviews, Games for Kids | No Comments

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Grinchmas (iTunes link, $0.99) makes a game out of of Dr Suess’ classic fable, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and given the excellent source material, we’re sad to say, we were disappointed.

There are two game modes in Grinchmas: Mean Grinch and Merry Grinch. Mean Grinch mode has you throwing snowballs at noisy houses in Whoville, the goal being to last as long as possible before the sound drives you mad. The second mode—Merry Grinch—has you delivering presents to Whoville houses by matching the color of the present to the house. You try and deliver as many as possible before time runs out.

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Review: Voices

Dec 5

Posted by Tim Barribeau in 99-Cent Apps, App Reviews | No Comments

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Voices (iTunes link, $0.99) is a rather silly and fun app that takes your voice and runs it through a series of filters. It’s hardly groundbreaking, but it’s pretty entertaining, especially when hanging around with friends.

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Voices lets you record your voice and listen back to it through one of 17 different filters: Cyborg, Chipmunk, Exorcism, Dark Side, Vocoder, Cave, Guitar, Funhouse, Vinyl, Helium, Reverse, Vintage, Megaphone, Canyon, Fan, Witness, or Turtle.
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Review: Battle of the iPhone Barcode Scanners

Dec 5

Posted by Tim Barribeau in App Reviews, Barcode Scanners | 3 Comments

We took three popular iPhone barcode scanners—RedLaser ($1.99), Barcode Scan Pro ($0.99), and ShopSavvy (free)—and pitted them against each other in a bid to see which was best, with some surprising results. To test them out, we scanned a number of items, both common and uncommon, and looked at which gave us the most results and the lowest prices. In our ratings, we also took into consideration the interface and how well the scanner recognized the barcodes.

Note: These tests were undertaken with an iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3GS has an autofocus camera, which may provide better scanning of bardcodes.

The Loot:

Four pack of sugar-free Red Bull
WESC Harp headphones
Star Wars Vault book
Gattaca DVD
Box of Shredded Wheat
Bottle of Matua Wine
Bottle of 42 Below Kiwi Vodka

We went for a good range of items, as some are common (Red Bull), and some are rare (Matua Wine). The products’ barcodes were on a number of different surfaces including curved bottles, which is tricky for the iPhone’s camera to scan. For each scanner, we’ll list the items, how many results it found, and what the lowest price found was.

ShopSavvy

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Red Bull: 2 results, $9.99
Headphones: 1 result, $20
Star Wars Vault: 32 results (27 online, 5 local), $19.80
Gattaca: 14 results (12 online, 2 local), $1.97
Shredded Wheat: 5 results, $5.39
Wine: 1 result, $9.95
Vodka: 0 results

ShopSavvy (free, iTunes link) provided, hands down, the best results. It was the only scanner to find the correct package of Red Bull and the headphones. It also was the only one that found local results, even out in the boonies where I am, and differentiated between used and new versions of products. It automatically sorts results by price, and has a gorgeous interface. Items can be added to a wish list or to price alerts, the latter of which checks for a lower price each time you launch the app. The only downside is that the scanner isn’t quite as good as RedLaser‘s—it’s slow—so it might take some fiddling to work. The manual search also isn’t as pretty as the other two apps, but you get much better results, so I’m not complaining.

Red Laser

Rating: 7.0 out of 10

Red Bull: 1 result, a 24 pack for $45.78
Headphones: 0 results
Star Wars Vault: 25 results, $19.72
Gattaca: 9 results, $2
Shredded Wheat: 5 results, $5.39
Matua Wine: 1 result, $9.95
Kiwi Vodka: 0 results

Redlaser ($1.99, iTunes link) had far and away the best scanner of the lot. It read the barcode quickly with the least amount of problems. It generally produced a large number of results, with a good price. On the downside, it displayed search results without highlighting which was the cheapest, which takes away a lot of the app’s usefulness. It also used ellipses in results, making it hard to tell the details of an item without navigating to the product seller’s website. On the upside, Redlaser had the most minimalistic interface and has a nice feature where previously searched items are stored in one massive list, from which they can be favorited or deleted.

Barcode Scan Pro

Rating: 4.6 out of 10

Red Bull: 1 result, a 24 pack for $45.78
Headphones: 0 results
Star Wars Vault: 1 result, $64.97
Gattaca: 5 results, $3.01
Shredded Wheat: 2 results, a 6 pack for $48.99
Wine: 1 result, $9.95
Vodka: 0 results

Barcode Scan (iTunes link) was easily the worst of the three. Of the seven items, not even a single one of them scanned. That’s right, after spending a very, very long time playing with positioning, angle, and light, I still couldn’t get a single correct scan from this app. What’s also bad, is that it forces you to take a photo of the barcode, which it then tries to read. The other two applications are constantly reading from the camera, and let you know when they register the barcode. Once the barcode was manually entered, it found the least results, and for the highest prices.

Barcode Scan wins a couple of points for its interface. The manual barcode entry is especially pretty, and it has some very good List features. You can add as many lists as you want, and share them with friends over email. If you scan an item that Barcode Scan has no results for, it allows you to upload information yourself.

Conclusion:

ShopSavvy (free, iTunes link) is our pick for the best iPhone scanner app. While it’s scanner isn’t the best (that honor goes to RedLaser [iTunes link]), it produced the most varied and cheapest product search results. Best of all, it’s free! So, while you might have to manually enter the information in sometimes or be patient as the barcode scans, the money you’ll save will be worth it.

Review: Star Wars: Trench Run

Nov 30

Posted by Tim Barribeau in App Reviews, iPhone and iPod Touch Game Reviews, iPhone and iPod Touch Games | No Comments

Star Wars: Trench Run ($4.99, iTunes link) puts you in the seat of Luke’s X-Wing during the climactic run on the Death Star. For lovers of all things Star Wars, the game offers an authentic feel and has excellent graphics and controls, great level design, and that magnificent John Williams soundtrack. The only knock we have against the game is lack of replayability.

The game is split into two modes: Mission and Arcade. Mission mode takes you chronologically through the trench run, starting with a dog fight above the Death Star, then into the trench, avoiding Darth Vader, and finally, bombing the exhaust vent. Each of the levels have a distinct play style, except the trench run/Vader sections, which play very similarly. Arcade mode is only the dog fight and trench run, with points allocated for speed, accuracy, and how many targets you demolish.

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The controls make excellent use of the accelerometer and touch screen. Movement is handled by tilting, and tapping on the bottom right chunk of the screen fires lasers. The bottom left enters “force mode” which slows down play to get you out of a tight spot, and the top corners change view and pause the game.

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Graphically, Star Wars: Trench Run is impressive. The blocky look of Star Wars ships lends themselves well to the limited number of polygons that the iPhone can handle, but they still look good. Apparently, the game looks even better on the 3GS, but I’m stuck with a 3G, so can’t comment.

The score for the game is the same glorious orchestral tracks and sound effects that we all know and love. Since it’s an official Star Wars app, they even have clips from the film tucked in the game. One oddity is that the Darth Vader voice clips are obviously not James Earl Jones, but a poor facsimile fed through a mediocre vocoder.

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The one significant issue we had with this game was replayability. The Mission mode can be beat in around 15 minutes, and Arcade doesn’t add much. Sure, there are 5 levels of difficulty, and apparently “Hidden Features”, but for the $5 asking price, it’s asking a bit much.

Conclusion

Star Wars: Trench Run captures the look and feel of that pivotal moment in episode IV, with great controls, fun gameplay and an epic soundtrack. However, as much fun as it is, the gameplay value is limited, given the high price. Due to this reason, we cautiously recommend the game, and give it a 7/10.

Star Wars: Trench Run is a $4.99 download from the iTunes App Store.