I don’t know any other languages besides English. It’s slightly embarrassing really. While I used to know some German, it all left my head somewhere over the years and now I’m stuck with just the one language. I’d love to learn another language but it’s finding the time and a form of studying that works for me. Spanish Touch Trainer helps hugely with this and it teaches you the correct manner of forming sentences.

It’s an app that, most of all, teaches you verb conjugation. Anyone who’s tried learning a language will know that verb conjugation is a huge problem when you’re just starting out. Spanish Touch Trainer teaches you how to figure this out via the context of real sentences. There’s no sign of silly phrases like ‘my monkey has a hat’ which you’ll never actually use. Instead there are useful phrases like ‘my name is…’ and ‘where do you live?’ The advanced side of the app offers more complex sentences such as ‘although they were very excited, they did not know how to get there,’ which can then be used to formulate your own complex sentences.

Once you’ve completed figuring out what Spanish word matches which English word, you can then listen to a recording of the sentence from a Spanish speaker. This is then handy for you to learn how to say things correctly. Besides the ‘game’ part of the app, there’s also a conjugation section which acts as a very handy reference tool while you’re learning.

Spanish Touch Trainer is a handy learning tool indeed. While it won’t teach you everything you need to know, it helps you out hugely with those pesky verb conjugations and even better, you can do it anywhere you like thanks to the portable nature of the iOS devices. Much more fun than being stuck slaving in front of textbooks.

[ Spanish Touch Trainer Review is a post from 148Apps ]

Bullet hell… meet accelerometer controls. Welcome to Super Blast 2.

Space shooter games are typically judged by how pretty the light show is in the middle of combat. Sure, being able to avoid incoming waves of enemy fire is great, but you really just want to get weapon upgrades that look cool and seem powerful. Forgoing all machismo, Super Blast 2 scraps all space shooter conventions by packing in accelerometer controls with autofire and keeps the weapon upgrades/parade of lights to a minimum.

I would honestly be a bit happier if there were more whiz-bang effects, but I guess that beggars can’t be choosers. In Super Blast 2, the object is to go through space without letting even one enemy pass you, because if you do it is game over. Using your accelerometer based controls, you must tilt your ship right and left to kill absolutely everything on the map while collecting limited time power ups to make your ship temporarily stronger. As much as it pains me, upgrades are not permanent, so don’t expect crazy weapon effects or glitzy weapon sprays.

Because of the strict objective (kill everything or lose), there aren’t many enemy units on screen at any given time and very few of the units actually shoot at you. You do have a health bar, but the only real threats to kill you are the smattering of “bosses” that come at certain intervals. The bosses do provide a bit more of a traditional bullet hell shooter challenge, but again, there are no glitzy light shows to make the experience grand.

What I would like to see in Super Blast 2 is more action. The threat of losing when a single enemy passes does add a good deal of excitement, but to really take it over the top the weapons need to get bigger (and maybe more permanent… heck, throw some RPG-esque weapon upgrades in after bosses), the enemies should fly in more intricate patterns, and the screen should be zoomed out a bit to fit more on-screen action. I love the graphics, I love the sound (the sound really is amazing), I just want more.

[ Super Blast 2 Review is a post from 148Apps ]

Supposedly I have quite a high IQ. I say supposedly as it was a while ago that I took the test and I’m convinced my laziness gets in the way of any actual intelligence. Still, I like taking tests like the ones offered by Mensa which makes Mensa Brain Test an ideal app to give a whirl.

Mensa Brain Test offers two modes – a training mode and the actual test. Training mode offers you five multiple choice questions to answer so as to get your brain in the right mood for answering the full tests. The full tests are true mind benders. You can choose to complete a short, medium or long test. The long tests are indeed rather long with 60 questions to answer across 60 minutes. Even the short test can take up to 20 minutes to complete. Mensa Brain Test is clearly a title that demands some time spent on it. The questions also require you to fully concentrate because as you’d expect, they’re challenging to say the least.

The questions are all genuine Mensa questions that are used in various test papers so if you gain a good score here, you’re clearly rather bright. Questions range from mathematical in nature to logical. Some are visual with you having to determine which is the odd one out from a set of images which is frequently much harder than it sounds. Others require you to answer analogies, e.g., something along the lines of ‘River is to Bank as Sea is to…’ All the questions are multiple choice, but this rarely makes it feel any easier.

A results screen enables you to compare and contrast your scores, checking to see whether you’re improving or not with time. There’s also Game Center support meaning you can compare yourself to others. Perhaps fortunately, you can choose whether to upload your scores to the global leaderboard or not – potentially saving yourself any embarrassment.

Mensa Brain Test is a rather satisfying quiz game to play through, although annoyingly it’s not long before questions are repeated. In the case of some, though, that doesn’t strictly mean you’ll remember the right answer though!

It’s not relaxing by any means and it’ll certainly tax your brain more so than any other quiz that I’ve played before. I did find with practice that I started to adjust my thinking appropriately and subsequently started to improve my scores. It’s more of a time commitment than most App Store titles, but Mensa Brain Test is definitely worth a look if you fancy something more cerebral than average quiz offerings.

[ Mensa Brain Test Review is a post from 148Apps ]

The Big Picture from The Boston Globe is an award winning photo-blog (Webby Award, People’s Voice for Best Use of Photography), that presents the latest news in pictorial form. New entries are posted three days a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday – and there’s now a new way to see these entries. The Big Picture has finally arrived, officially, to iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad in an all-in-one universal application. For this review, I’ve used the most appropriate device: the iPad.

When opening The Big Picture, the most recent photo set is featured, along with its name, number of photos and date of publication. Below that, you’ll find the thirteen most recent photograph sets in much smaller format, spanning three pages. All contain the same information as the featured photo set.

To get started, tap on a photo set. Before you’re taken to the photos themselves, a little information is provided, in order to get you acquainted with the background behind the photos. In this case, our featured photo set is of the wildfires in Israel that began earlier this month. After some optional reading of (disheartening) facts, tapping “View Entry” will take you to what this application is all about: photos.

The Big Picture works in both portrait and landscape mode, though all photos are designed to be viewed in the latter format. Perhaps most importantly, the photos are of high quality: there’s no scaled down, bandwidth-saving feature, meaning you’ll be viewing high quality photos all the time. A small summary is attached to each photo, providing specific information about what you’re viewing, as well as a counter to let you know how many photos are left in the set. Tapping on the screen once will remove all of this additional information, providing full focus on the photo at hand.

Of course, this being the social world, The Big Picture has integrated a number of Sharing options for each photo: mail, facebook and twitter, the latter two of which are integrated into the application itself. Oddly, the application doesn’t feature in-built mail, it switches to Mail.app – odd given the fact that, of the three sharing options, this is the only one that Apple provide a system for. Options to save the photo to your library, as well as view the photo in Safari, are also present.

However, there are a few problems and drawbacks, the most significant of which is the lack of photo pre-loading. Every photo, even whenever you’re in a set, loads individually whenever you move to that specific page. On 3G, I found that it took in and around two seconds per photo to load, which might not sound like much, but after 35 photos worth that’s a lot of dead seconds. In addition, with the exception of sharing, there’s very little integration to the iPhone or iPad, making it feel somewhat unofficial and ported rather than developed straight for the iPad. In comparison to Wide Angle Review, which I reviewed earlier this year, the navigation for photos seems dry and boring. An option to show all photos on a page (in smaller format with the ability to tap to full screen) certainly wouldn’t go a-miss. Lastly, not all photo sets are actually available, only the most recent ones. This very much limits what the overall application has to offer.

Overall, I’m mixed towards The Big Picture. On the one hand, the service that it offers is invaluable, but on the other I can’t help but feel that the application isn’t near its full potential. The former is a personal comment, the latter a reviewing comment. Ultimately, it’s the reviewing comments that determine the rating.

[ The Big Picture Review is a post from 148Apps ]

Wispin is the sort of game that tries to trick you with its cutey-pie graphics and doe-eyed main character into thinking it’s some sort of simple children’s game. Once you fire it up though you realize you’re in for a challenging, fast-paced affair that will tax both your brain and your reflexes. The game delivers some quick-hitting fun, and only the overly loose controls keep it from being an absolute classic.

In order to succeed in Wispin you must take out colorful blob enemies by smashing into them with the main character. The trick is the blobs come in three different colors; hit them when your Wispin matches the color of the blob and you’ll dispatch it, but run into it when you’re a different hue and you’ll take damage. The ability to change Wispin’s color on the fly means that you’ll be constantly shifting colors to clean up stages, so be ready to work those thumbs. Furthermore, players are rewarded for taking out multiple baddies of the same color in a row, so you may want to weave past some foes in order to snag that last blue or red enemy to keep your streak intact.

The game manages to up the ante by adding in varying enemy types and power-ups as you go. The enemies are especially fun to watch as each sort of forms himself up out of nothing using some cool animations. This is one of those games where it’s easy to lose your focus because you’re so busy admiring the surprisingly sharp and crisp visuals.

The only notable flaw in Wispin is the floaty controls that never seem to match up with the amount of precision needed. The game can be controlled either via tilt or onscreen joystiq, but neither is all that reliable. The major problem is that the enemies exist in a 3D space on a 2D plane, so positioning Wispin in just the right spot can be pretty tough. Furthermore, our hero moves around fairly quickly in the stage, so if you miss a foe it’s easy to drift off course and either miss again coming back around or accidentally hit another enemy. Those expecting precision from the game are going to be sorely disappointed.

Aside from that complaint, Wispin is a fun, beautiful game that offers a good amount of entertainment. It’s not a mind-blowing experience, but it is entertaining and very well-made. Just keep in mind that the blobs are only cute until they try and kill you with fire; then things start getting real.

[ Wispin Review is a post from 148Apps ]