Android – Iphone – Applications

Immediately there’s something that stops Stackster from being fantastic fun – its control system. It’s so annoyingly flawed it makes what could have been a great game, merely quite average.

Back tracking a moment, Stackster is an Arkanoid clone. I love Arkanoid, I’ve been playing it obsessively for years and I love many of its clones. I hoped this would be the case with Stackster but unfortunately it’s not quite worth it. At first, the control system feels fine. You use your finger to move the paddle from side to side in order to bounce the ball towards the blocks that must be destroyed. The problem lies in the fact that while your finger is held down to move the paddle, you can’t actually see the paddle. My fingers are far from large but I hate to imagine how much more of a problem this would be if you’ve got large hands and fingers.

Not being able to see the paddle clearly makes the game much harder. It’s so infuriating missing the ball because you couldn’t see exactly where the paddle is. If the bottom of Stackster’s screen had an area in which to move your finger, making it clear from the paddle image, this would have been all solved.

It’s a shame as Stackster would be a lot of fun if it wasn’t for this. There’s 100 levels in all and you can replay levels as and when you choose. The graphics, although simple, fit the Arkanoid style perfectly and the physics engine is quite effective when it comes to bouncing balls. The potential is clearly there.

As it stands though, Stackster is just a little too frustrating to be worth recommending over the likes of Arkanoid, even if it is more expensive. Still, if you’re desperate for something like Arkanoid but you’ve only got 99c spare, Stackster does at least offer a ton of levels.

[ Stackster Review is a post from 148Apps ]

written by janyton \\ tags: Iphone, making-it-clear, paddle

Currently, more than 140,000 applications are available for the users of iPhone and iPod Touch. Many of the new customers of Apple iPad Slate enjoy a collection of applications that they accrued for use on the iPhone or iPod Touch. You also have an opportunity to sync your iPhone apps to the iPad with the help of iTunes. Below are the instructions for doing so:

Open iTunes

If you are in possession of an iPhone or iPod Touch, conceivably you have an iTunes account too.  If you don’t have iTunes on your PC, you can download the most advanced version free from the Apple website.

Back up your iPhone/iPod Touch Apps

Use a USB connector to join your iPhone or iPod Touch to your PC. The iTunes will perceive that your iPod has been connected and will add a line called ‘Devices’ under your library and store menus on the left hand side of iTunes. Devices column will be filled and the name that you have chosen to you iPhone or iPod Touch will appear. Now click on your device name to open your syncing options and click the sync button in lower right hand corner. This will make a back of all your apps to iTunes. After finishing the sync, you can disconnect your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Sync your iPhone/iPod Touch Apps to the iPad

Now join the iPad to your PC. The iPad will also be shown up in the devices menu of iTunes. Click it and select the Applications tab. Make a choice for the items you want to sync and pres the sync button in the lower right hand corner. Now your iPhone or iPod Touch applications will be synced to your iPad.

Make a Decision to View your Applications

After syncing your iPhone or iPod touch apps to iPad, you may run them in the actual size. This option will open up a screen of the size of the Touch screen within your iPad. You can also expand the app, so it fits your iPad Screen.

Most of the iPhone apps were designed with the minimum screen resolution needed to run efficiently in an iPhone sized screen, so by mounting the app to fit the 9.7” screen of the iPad. You may find that picture quality is not that good.  Luckily, the developers are already working to make apps with a screen resolution to match the iPad dimensions. You can choose yourself, which screen size optimum for your particular applications.

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written by icegary1101 \\ tags: apple ipad slate, apple iphone, business, family, free ipad apps, friends, Games, how to, iphone apps sharing, iphone apps transfer, ipod, itunes account, sync

Halcyon is the latest offering from Zach Gage; a delicately presented game that looks effortless on first glance. But upon diving into this minimalist game players may find a supreme challenge that is more than they bargained for; in other words, Halcyon is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But it is also a game that could only be properly realised on the iPad and because of its accessibility it’s easy to pick up again and try to persevere.

The game is all about currents; small, coloured triangles that edge slowly across the screen into the middle. If just one pair meets that is not of the same colour, the game is over; so there’s no room for mistakes. Fortunately, currents can be swapped onto a new line simply by swiping a path from the old line. Paths are left on the screen if there is no current to take them at the moment they’re drawn, for better or for worse, but happily the currents will attract each other if they’re the same colour, freeing up screen space to enable players to concentrate on the rest.

Halcyon will sound an alert if a pair of wrongly matched currents are on a collision course, but there’s no extra complexity; just the simple act of quickly pairing currents. It can be overwhelming. Fortunately, currents may pass over to the other side of the screen and re-emerge without penalty, so if there is too many pairs to cope with a simple re-arrange will do the trick. Alertness is key; Halcyon will punish players that do not spot matches quickly and often.

The three modes that are included are essentially the same; with the main mode players can choose to start on one of four environments once they are unlocked; the wind, the sea, the land and the stars; the other two modes don’t have a set number of waves and so they’re perfect for high score achieving.

And yet for all this talk about challenging but simple gameplay, Halcyon offers it all up in a package that is only calm and tranquil. With its generative ambiance that is affected by where players place currents, it can feel like loosely playing a musical instrument. Indeed, with the way the game is presented there’s no extraneous matter; score is only displayed upon hitting the top of the screen to pause, and level progress is gently indicated by opposing lines that grow towards the centre of the screen as currents are matched.

Overall, Halcyon is not truly a must have game despite its intriguing air. Its gameplay does not yield more surprise after repeated play-throughs and so may grow tired quickly, even with the Game Center integration that is new in iOS 4.2. But what is here is fresh, engaging and fiercely challenging; if you’re looking for something that’s unlike many iPad games out there right now then you should get this one.

[ Halcyon Review is a post from 148Apps ]

written by jkpra999 \\ tags: Game, Games, halcyon, hitting-the-top, minimalist, review, wind, zach gage

So far, freemium apps have been little more than takes off of Farmville or We Rule – manage a farm, city, kingdom, whatever, grow crops and/or build things, wait till you make enough of a certain resource to build more, and visit your friends to see how they’re doing, and to interact with them in some often trivial way. What there just isn’t a lot of is action and violence. What if I want to attack my friends’ farms? What if I want to get new things by going into a dungeon and slaying some monsters, and getting rewards for doing so, not to mention getting the feeling of playing an ‘actual’ game with real-time gameplay? How can I sate my virtual bloodlust while still feeling the ‘thrill’ of growing and building things on my properties? If you have wished for this specific set of features, then I suggest that you not only get out of my brain, but that you also get excited for Kingdom Conquest (stylized as -KingdomConquest-), a freemium social game that’s a bit more, shall we say brutal and action-packed, than your run-of-the-mill social and farming games.

Kingdom Conquest’s gameplay is a three-pronged affair, each one connected to the other in fundamental ways. The first prong is the farming/resource management gameplay. You have a base where you develop resources that you use to build new facilities to generate resources faster, make new facilities to hold more monsters, raise stats, and more. You have 4 types of resources, Wood, Stone, Iron, and Food, the first 3 only able to be created by special production facilities adjacent to specific land portions on your territory (like forests for wood). The second prong is conquering territories. You collect and develop monsters that you use to conquer territory that have different levels that make them harder to conquer, but have more of the special resource squares to produce with, if you decide to build a base there. Regulating your ability to grab land is a stat called Reign, which recharges every 12 hours or so, and while you can send out units indefinitely to gain experience and raise their stats, each new territory square you conquer lowers your Reign, preventing you from just bieng able to grab land indiscriminately. This land conquering mode is also where the competitive multiplayer comes in, as you share a map with other players, and you will be fighting with other players for empty land and to try and conquer their land. As well, you can join an alliance to get help whenever your land is attacked, and to have a bigger footprint on the game world with your alliance. The third prong is the one that will appeal most to core gamers – the dungeon crawling aspect. You can take your character and play with up to 3 other players to visit dungeons filled with enemies. The purpose of the dungeon crawling is not just to level up your character – by completing so many floors of each dungeon, and by defeating the boss, you get stars that can be used to draw items from each dungeon’s pack of items – these vary from new equipment to the real draw, new monsters for your army. To keep you from just being able to grind your way to getting the best monsters and equipment, you only get 4 dungeon dispatches every 24 hours without paying for more.

Kingdom Conquest is a freemium game, and the premium part of the freemium portmanteau comes from the Charge Points. They can be used to increase resource production, allow you to queue up and/or immediately complete more construction, increase your monsters’ attack, defense, experience, and buy more dungeon dispatches. CP comes at as low as 100 for $0.99 (100 points allowing you to increase production of a resource for a week and queueing up a couple additional buildings to be made) and up to $43.99 for 6500 CP, which will mean you won’t have to wait very long to get new resources or building projects to complete for a while. The one thing you can’t do with CP is buy more Reign, so while CP lets you get an advantage on other players or just be your impatient self, it doesn’t just mean that the richest player wins.

Kingdom Conquest is insanely deep. There is a lot to do in this game, far more than your average farming game. Just the land conquering and dungeon crawling aspects alone are more gameplay than what you see from other freemium games. And yet, it still contains those addictive hooks that the typical farming game does, just with so much more to do. And it helps that there are more gamer-friendly elements as well, especially since there is ‘actual’ gameplay (with synchronous multiplayer to boot) here with the dungeon crawling mode. It adds an air of legitimacy to this game, that there’s something to do here besides waiting around for resources to be generated, or buildings to finish building, or for units to go out and return. Yes, there are those elements that are set up in the traditional social game elements of “waiting for actions to complete.,” but since you can go and accomplish things by going out and killing some monsters, and playing what would be considered an actual game. It makes this game feel more legitimate than it would without it.

But of course, what makes this game great is that it still nails all the other aspects that social games typically have, and then gives them more purpose. There’s strategy in just what you decide to do – do you decide to produce more units with your resources to make them stronger? Do you build that new building to improve your stats or to unlock new unit types? Or do you apply them towards that upgrade that you feel like you need? Everything has a cost, and learning how to manage those costs is how you succeed in this game. Those layers of depth make this harder to get into than your average We Rule-esque game, but the depth is what makes this one unique, and what keeps you coming back. You really have to work to find yourself out of things to do with this game. It can be hard to progress in this game, but thankfully the Quests largely serve as goals that you can progress towards, as they largely consist of goals like raising your territory’s population or being able to generate so much of certain resources, or raising your monsters to a certain level. While progression can feel a bit aimless at times, the Quest menu gives you specirfic goals to work toward, and even though the game offers a tutorial at the beginning, you really ought to skip it, as the first few quests will cover exactly what the tutorial has you do, just with actual productive results for you.

But really, Kingdom Conquest’s biggest issue is that it can be often aimless – there is a LOT to do, and it’s often not apparent what you need to do next. There are a lot of things that I was confused about that the help screens never actually explained, that it took posting on my Alliance’s message board or just random guessing to discover. The dungeon crawling aspect could be more involved, as it is just very basic here, just involving flat dungeons that you and your party slay monsters in until you go to the next level. It feels like a very primitive version of Phantasy Star Online. As well, if you don’t have a magician type character in your party (the only one of the three classes that can heal characters), then you may be out of luck if you’re in a particularly hard dungeon. The dungeon crawling could have been more fully realized as a whole, particularly as its overall purpose in the game is to allow you random draws at new usable minions more than anything else, and if you really want to skip that part of the game, you could just try to win monsters in auctions using your Daily Points that you get for completing actions. As well, while Kingdom Conquest is a different kind of social/farming game, it still does use a lot of the elements, such as time limitations, that other games have. If you hate social games for those time elements, then you’ll eventually be annoyed by this game as well. Also, as an iPad owner, I would really appreciate if this was updated to be Universal, as the app looks kind of ugly scaled to 2X.

But really, Kingdom Conquest does a fantastic job at being more than just the typical farming game, while keeping a lot of what makes these types of freemium games work. While the “-mium” part of “freemium” is definitely in play, you can definitely enjoy this game without ever needing to spend a dime (although I was provided CP for the purposes of this review, and it does help with building and producing resources, along with my natural impatience, for sure), and there’s just a lot to do here. This is a casual game for gamers, people who want to feel like they actually want to do things besides just watching and waiting for their crops grow, to actually play with and against actual people. Kingdom Conquest is a great step up for social and freemium games, and one that is worth checking out for those who have been turned off to the genre, or for those looking for something more than their typical farming app.

[ Kingdom Conquest Review is a post from 148Apps ]

written by husain \\ tags: 0.00, alliance, daily, dungeon, dungeon crawler, freemium, Game, iphone apps and games, rating, Tutorial, typical

In the rush to push graphics and sound to the bleeding edge, a lot of developers seem to forget that the most important thing about any game is to provide solid, fun core gameplay. This is a concept the studio behind Stick Golf takes very seriously, as they have released a game which may not be visually overwhelming, but instead offers some of the most fun and engaging play of any app in recent memory. This game is as straightforward as it gets, and it’s also one of the most fun games you’ll play all year.

The setup in Stick Golf couldn’t be simpler, merely aim the trajectory of your ball, set the power and then try and get to the green in as few strokes as possible. The trick comes in the level design, which features an ever-expanding lineup of super-challenging holes. Course design is the epitome of risk/reward, with plenty of shots meant to entice players to take a risk. Hit the shot perfectly and you’ll be set up for an amazing score, miss by just a fraction and you’re in a hazard and likely taking penalty strokes. This layout makes the game challenging but rarely frustrating, as you always feel that you’re right on the cusp of figuring out a hole and shooting an unbelievable score.

The only thing that prevents Stick Golf from being a dream come true is the lack of fine-tuning in the controls. You can only change your shot direction by tapping on onscreen arrows, so it’s sometimes difficult to get the absolute perfect angle. This isn’t a problem in most games, but in a title demanding this high a level of precision it can sometimes cause problems. Then again, most missed shots are due to your own miscalculation rather than the game trying to cheat you, so this minor issue may be little more than a scapegoat.

With tons of challenge, a wide variety of substantially different courses and a great sense of verticality in the levels, Stick Golf is an app which any iPhone owner should definitely have in their collection. Say goodbye to your loved ones since you won’t be seeing them for a while and then dive into this absolutely amazing game.

[ Stick Golf Review is a post from 148Apps ]

written by rockingevil \\ tags: Application, device-reviewed, Game, Games, green, Iphone, iphone apps and games, links, power, rating, shot