Extinction Squad fades fast

Posted on May 22, 2012 by

Spoiler alert! Extinction Squad costs little, and offers plenty of action. Think of it as Breakout with animals, only you don’t break bricks. Animals do die, however. Three Stars.

Extinction Squad isn’t the best game Apple selected for App of the Week, but it doesn’t suck. If this seems like faint praise, I feel it’s appropriate to the game.

The game format is familiar, a variation on a variation of the classic Breakout, which challenges you to catch items before they hit the ground. The twist in Extinction Squad, however, is that the paddle/box is a trampoline and you have to bounce animals into the safety net. Sometimes you have to bounce them more than once, while still trying to position the trampoline under other animals.

Extinction Squad is a variation of Breakout. Instead of a paddle, you position the trampoline to bounce the animals to safety. You can play levels in two locations before you have to buy coins and gadgets from the game store.

As you might expect, each level becomes more difficult. You have to catch more animals, they fall faster and in increasingly distant locations. The more animals you save without dropping any to their deaths the more points you score. When animals drop, they splat graphically on the ground with disgustingly gruesome graphics.

The splat graphics alone indicate Extinction Squad is mainly a game for teen and pre-teen boys who still like to smell farts and make jokes about vomit and other bodily discharge. A couple of years ago I railed on a similar game about cats for its graphic depiction of kitty demise, and this game is almost as gruesome. But the overall design and artwork are good enough to make the dying a little more palatable.

The ultimate demise of creatures you miss is fairly graphic. I can’t see girls who like Care Bears or My Pretty Pony spending much time with Extinction Squad. Think pre-teen boys who still like to gross out girls and think it’s sexy. Although, I know guys like that in their twenties, so maybe the demographic is slightly broader.

You also have to dodge bombs, which stop the game instantly if they hit you. In addition, you can catch shields, animal magnets, coins and even spins on the wheel of fortune. The game comes with two locations unlocked, Africa and the Amazon, but additional levels (with higher scores) require hundreds of coins. Unfortunately, the game is stingy with coins.

You can pick up two or three coins a level, but it costs nine coins to restart the game after a bomb. My advice is not to bother.

So how do you earn coins? (Do you really need to ask?) You buy them n the game’s shop, along with just about every other gadget and gimmick. As you might expect, this can quickly take the game from a dollar game to a game you might buy for thirty or forty dollars at a video store.

Jenny Manytoes rates Extinction Squad

Jenny Manytoes would take a nap next to Extinction Squad. It’s the kind of game she can knock around for a while before she moves on to something challenging.

The Jenny Manytoes Rating System


Jenny Manytoes, our polydactyl cat
  • When Jenny makes biscuits on a product she thinks she’s in heaven.
  • When Jenny purrs over a product she’s very happy.
  • When Jenny naps next to a product it’s okay with her.
  • When Jenny bunches her tail she can live with a product, but she has higher expectations.
  • When Jenny leaves it in the litter box….I don’t think I need to explain this one.
Posted in 3 Stars - nap, Arcade Games, Entertainment, Games, In-App Purchases | Leave a comment

Passing on Cook’s Illustrated Magazine

Posted on May 21, 2012 by

Spoiler alert! Apple reaches a new low by selecting Cook’s Illustrated Magazine as their free iPad app of the Week. Once again, it’s a newsstand magazine and the only thing you get for free it the shell. If you want a preview, you have to buy an issue. I’ll pass. No stars.

I’ve already expressed my frustration with Apple for choosing a Newsstand magazine as App of the Week. This time you can’t even get a preview of the magazine. But you have to buy at least a one month prescription to Cook’s Illustrated Magazine to look between the covers. It’s only two dollars, but most Newsstand magazines at least let you browse a few pages.

This is all you get when you download your sample of Cooking. Just to look you have to buy a month subscription.

You can get a far better look at the magazine by browsing the screen shots of the magazine in the App Store. From what I could tell, Cook’s Illustrated Magazine is a magazine. A magazine with a nice design and layout, but a magazine. A decent combination of articles and step-by-step tips sheets, but a magazine.

The best I can say about it is that if you intend to subscribe anyway, go with the iPad app. You won’t lose recipes or issues on your bookshelf or to cat pee. You won’t have to search through all that paper to find what you need.

If you’re really into cooking, it might be worth the price to browse. That’s the best recommendation I can give.

Jenny Manytoes rates Cook’s Illustrated Magazine

Actually, she doesn’t. But she’s pissed at Apple, not Cook’s. No stars.

The Jenny Manytoes Rating System

Jenny Manytoes, our polydactyl cat
  • When Jenny makes biscuits on a product she thinks she’s in heaven.
  • When Jenny purrs over a product she’s very happy.
  • When Jenny naps next to a product it’s okay with her.
  • When Jenny bunches her tail she can live with a product, but she has higher expectations.
  • When Jenny leaves it in the litter box….I don’t think I need to explain this one.

 

Posted in 0 Stars—Total Waste, Free, In-App Purchases, Newsstand | Tagged , | Leave a comment

LostWinds2 lives down to its name

Posted on May 15, 2012 by

Spoiler alert! LostWinds2 is a sadly appropriate name for a game with a lot of effects and little to do. It’s fun to watch but only okay to play. You will find very little action in return for a lot of effort. Three stars.

When it comes to start of the art game design, LostWinds2 simply can’t be beat. The design is spectacular, the game physics superb, the animation delightful. The more I play it, however, the more I feel that the game got left out of the equation.

LostWinds2 is a model game designers should emulate. But the developers need to remember players enjoy constant challenge. During the first few minutes of game play you know why Apple picked it as Game of the Week. After ten or fifteen you wonder how mediocre its competitors must have been.

The game storyline is reasonably entertaining. You are Toku, the empire’s royal screw up, who is late once again for his appointment with the emperor. In the first level you must learn enough skills to prove yourself worthy of the princess given the fact that no one else is in the running.

In LostWinds2 Toku travels through seasonal worlds to find the princess. The animation is smooth and the physics pretty naturalistic.

The pace is slow enough to let you master basic skills, such as running, jumping and throwing projectiles. Different mile markers introduce you to a new aspect of the game. You will also be confronted with obstacles and barriers requiring that you must figure out to overcome. Unfortunately, the puzzles are pretty basic too.

Most of the skills you are still learning by the second chapter of the game are skills other games require you to pick up in the first couple of levels. Game controls are extremely sensitive and well programmed, so you could probably pick them up a lot more quickly.

Each time you need to learn a new skill the game alerts you and provides a quick lesson explaining what to do.

On the other hand, the experience of running, jumping and sliding on ice are very realistic for digital simulations. The animation is remarkably smooth and the graphics fun to watch. LostWinds2 feels more like an interactive storybook than a game, and at that level it’s a great interactive book.

I would definitely recommend LostWinds2 for players new to simulation games. The learning curve is gradual enough to allow players to master skills they will need for more sophisticated games with faster action. It’s hard to hate LostWinds2, in fact I want to love it. Many players will. But many players will find themselves playing and playing and waiting for something really fun to happen.

Jenny Manytoes rates LostWinds2

Jenny Manytoes would take a nap next to LostWinds2. It’s a game she can bat around for a couple of minutes before she moves on to a real challenge, like the new hyperactive puppy Pearl.

The Jenny Manytoes Rating System


Jenny Manytoes, our polydactyl cat
  • When Jenny makes biscuits on a product she thinks she’s in heaven.
  • When Jenny purrs over a product she’s very happy.
  • When Jenny naps next to a product it’s okay with her.
  • When Jenny bunches her tail she can live with a product, but she has higher expectations.
  • When Jenny leaves it in the litter box….I don’t think I need to explain this one.
Posted in 3 Stars - nap, Arcade Games, Entertainment, Games | Tagged | Leave a comment

artCircles spins great art for iPad

Posted on May 14, 2012 by

Spoiler alert! Art lovers will appreciate artCircles more than any other art appreciation app I’ve seen on the iPad. It is ingenious, colorful and free associative in a way have yet to see on any computer or device. Best Buy.

Even if you look at art and try to convince yourself that your three-year-old could do that, artCircles will provide you a way to look at art that makes the experience enjoyable. You may even figure out why your three-year-old is no more likely to create some modernist masterpieces than cats, elephants or tree frogs.

If you love art, I won’t have to sell you at all. artCircles makes art fun in a way other apps can’t. Not only does the app offer a broad spectrum of classic and modern art and photography, it makes finding art as fun as a board game.

artCircles links images through a series of wheels. Developed by the website art.com, the app allows you to find art by collection, color palette and inspiring words. Art.com promises additional circles in the months to come, but my favorite has to be the texture circles.

Interlocked wheels drive the home screen interface. Spinning one wheel turns the other wheel to reveal a sample of the images in each link. Art.com promises to add circles in the future.

Anyone who sat in front of a painting in a gallery or museum and then seen it in print or on a poster is almost always let down. More than a matter of scale, the loss is one of texture. Seeing a painting on the wall allows you to see the textures created by the artists’s tools, and these can bring life to a painting you could never imagine.

The textures view tiles images in a way that allows viewers to zoom in and see the texture captured by high quality digital scan. This is something film could rarely capture. Art.com is still working out the kinks, and even digital texture is flat compared to the real canvas. But you can get a sense of the ripples and curls and piled on paint crafted by brushes and palette knives.

The interface is as elegant as any I’ve seen. Spinning the topic wheel turns a series of thumbnails on the images wheel, giving you a glimpse of the linked artwork. Once you select your collection, you can play the collection as a slide show or scroll through the images one at a time.

The image page is elegantly designed. Most images describe the painting and you can order prints directly from the app.

Most of the images contain detailed accounts of the art and story behind each piece. You can also create an art.com account to save your favorites, post the images on your facebook wall and even purchase framed prints of favorite images to display in your home or office.

This is one of the best collections of art, prints and photos I’ve seen. Most of the major periods are covered, and the collections cover graphic and commercial images as well as fine art and photography. The reproductions are astoundingly clear and the color palettes vibrate on the iPad3 retina display.

A fun feature allows you to superimpose the paintings on an image in your camera frame or a picture in your camera roll. You can resize and reposition the art and then save the picture and email it to family.

You can also take pictures of your home or office with images with the art superimposed in the images. Then you can email the photos to your friends. I’ve seen this feature in other apps, but artCircles allows you to position and size the image against the background.

If I were an art teacher I would recommend this app to any student with an iPad, which they can buy with their Apple student discount. The combined price (free plus iPad) is slightly more expensive than an art textbook, but it won’t sit on your shelf all semester before you sell it back for ten percent of what you paid.

Jenny Manytoes rates artCircles

Jenny Manytoes would make biscuits all over artCircles. The colors are so pretty she wants to catch them and drag them under the couch with all her other kills. artCircles would be a best buy even if it weren’t free.

The Jenny Manytoes Rating System


Jenny Manytoes, our polydactyl cat
  • When Jenny makes biscuits on a product she thinks she’s in heaven.
  • When Jenny purrs over a product she’s very happy.
  • When Jenny naps next to a product it’s okay with her.
  • When Jenny bunches her tail she can live with a product, but she has higher expectations.
  • When Jenny leaves it in the litter box….I don’t think I need to explain this one.
Posted in 5 Stars + Best Buy, Art appreciation, Education, Free, In-App Purchases | Tagged | Leave a comment

Lego Harry Potter packs iPad wallop

Posted on May 8, 2012 by

Spoiler alert! Let’s be honest, you probably could care less about Lego Harry Potter 2 because you’re old enough to read. But if you have an iPad your kids are probably whining for it right now. I can’t imagine that it competes with the playstation version (which costs ten times as much) but for an iPad game it’s pretty damn good. Five stars.

My nephews love Legos Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Or they did for about three months until the next best thing came out. I know because Carol and I got them for them for two different Christmases and then spent the entire vacation watching them play on the downstairs TV while my sister and brother-in-law played Guitar Studio on the upstairs TV. Good thing we had our iPads.

The Lego incarnations of hit movies follow the movies faithfully except for one thing. All the characters, sets and props are made with legos. Not real Legos, digital Legos, but you should still get the gist. The characters look like Legos characters and everything has that weird Lego look with the little round lock caps sticking out like a bad case of hives. But these characters run, jump and shoot (or, in the case of Star Wars, twirl light swords). Or, in the case of Lego Harry Potter 2, cast spells with Lego wands.

We never got the Playstation Lego Harry Potter series for our nephews. My sister Aimee thinks Harry Potter is a Satanic influence, and so does my mother who lives with them. And even if Aimee didn’t think Harry Potter was satanic, my mother does and she would never stop reminding Aimee that her kids are playing a Satanic game.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Aimee and I were raised Baptist Preacher’s Kid (BPK) and part of being a BPK is being told that just about everything that doesn’t jump out of the Bible, carry the Jesus brand or that became cool after your parents stopped being cool and became BPAS is Satanic.

My parents graduated from the ultimate BPK school of the time, Bob Jones University. At their commencement Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., (the eldest of three) preached on the topic “Bobbed hair, bobbed personality.” (What an appropriate topic for a college commencement.) Mother had bobbed hair at the time. By the time she had her own kids she would have agreed with every word of a commencement speech entitled, “The Beatles; opening act for the Devil.”

So even though I don’t intend to play Lego Harry Potter 2 myself, I do plan to slip my iPad to the nephews when I visit next Christmas.

Oh, wait a minute. Considering how long it took them to destroy the air hogs we gave them for their birthdays, maybe I’ll keep my iPad to myself.

Lego Harry Potter 2 is a simulated action game where you wander around a 3D environment looking for coins, energy, weapons and bad guys. With Legos. The game simulates the action and plots of the last four Harry Potter movies. You start from home base in Hogwarts and work your way through each of the movies (stages) until, presumably, you defeat Voldermort. I assume this because I only had time to play through several levels of Order of the Phoenix in time to review.

In order to move between game areas you have to find Lego pieces and assemble them. This isn’t the complex, fine motor skill assembly with real Legos. Once you cast the spell, the game does all the work. So if you’re looking to build Lego bricks, buy the plastic variety.

In order to make your way through the game map you have to unlock Lego blocks with your spells and build them into drawbridges and vehicles. As you complete each stage you have to sit through a long legomated recap of the movie. Personally, I’d rather wait ten seconds for a screen load and to get on with the game.

As you progress through the levels you unlock additional characters and you can pass the game back and forth between them to call on their different skills and abilities. You also earn additional skills and spells. You also get to face down the full assortment of dementors, wizards and other bad guys using the spells you master as you pass through the game.

Practice your spell casting skills in Hogwarts before you tackle the real bad guys in the game. In this case it helps to have a real target, but this was the best I could do for a screen shot.

The game mechanics are among the best I’ve experienced for 3D simulation games, and I suspect children with smaller fingers will have more success. The joystick button was incredibly responsive and only one of the buttons tended to stick (a glitch I’m sure they’ll work out quickly). The help system is context sensitive and usually informative. Just make sure to practice in Hogwarts before you start the first stage.

Is this as good as Lego Harry Potter on a Wii or Playstation? I can’t imagine that it would be. But it beats the daylights out of the mobile game systems and it could help your kids pass the time when you’re visiting the dentist or lawyer and you desperately need them not to whine.

Jenny Manytoes rates Lego Harry Potter 2

Jenny Manytoes would make biscuits all over Lego Harry Potter 2. It’s fun, it works well and it’s great for kids whose parents aren’t paranoid about their souls.

The Jenny Manytoes Rating System


Jenny Manytoes, our polydactyl cat
  • When Jenny makes biscuits on a product she thinks she’s in heaven.
  • When Jenny purrs over a product she’s very happy.
  • When Jenny naps next to a product it’s okay with her.
  • When Jenny bunches her tail she can live with a product, but she has higher expectations.
  • When Jenny leaves it in the litter box….I don’t think I need to explain this one.
Posted in 5 Stars - Biscuits, Entertainment, Games, Virtual simulation | Tagged | Leave a comment

eBay for iPad = ieBay?

Posted on May 7, 2012 by

Spoiler alert! Cooler than eBay on a browser. Four stars.

There’s a lot of initials in eBay for iPad. Is is iPad before eBay (iPad version), or eBay before iPad? Technically eBay came first but without the iPad there would be no iPad eBay. Not a lot of rhyming rules to help us out either.

iPad eBay is a splendid example of why people prefer apps to browsers. For some reason browser user interfaces haven’t caught up with tablet UIs. They try, but browsers pretty much look the same as they did ten or twelve years ago. Flash apps helped (I promise not to go there even though Steve is gone and there’s nothing standing in the way of Apple’s making peace with Adobe). CSS and HTML5 offered some promise but they seem to look better on tablets.

This could be why there have been so many magazine, shopping and site apps. Actually, this is why there are so many of them. Not all of them are successful but when they do a good job, they make the web look even dowdier than before. And eBay’s web site has looked long in the tooth for several years now.

iPad eBay does nothing the site won’t do on any browser, at least not when it comes to tracking down items. It looks great by comparison and if you’re an avid eShopper, you will probably love this. The app is beautiful and easy to customize.

Even if you find the gears intimidating, using the app is simple. You pull down the search menu, select your category and narrow your search down until you find what you need. Or you type in your search terms. This is exactly like browser eBay except that the menus are larger and easier to read.

Customizing your home screen is as simple as working with your iPad pages. It takes about five seconds to set your app up to get you to your favorite shopping items.

You can easily customize the home screen to launch your favorite categories. The interface should already be familiar. The edit button allows you to delete items, just like the iPad screen, and the plus button allows you to add new items. If you pretty much limit your shopping to books and movies, you can add buttons to take you directly to those categories.

You can also browse items in a way that lets you look for what you want to buy. You can adjust the screen to view as icons or columns. One of the most useful allows you to browse items like email, with items in a column and descriptions filling the screen to the right.

This is one of the many view settings for browsing listed items. You can switch between any of three viewing options.

It’s hard to get excited and gushy over eBay. It’s just another shopping app. But if you use eBay for your online shopping, you will definitely enjoy the iPad version more.

Jenny Manytoes rates eBay for iPad

Jenny Manytoes would purr next to eBay. She uses it to order cat food and cat toys because she can’t use a mouse on a real computer. In fact, she drags the mouse under the couch to kill it. The only thing she hasn’t figured out is how to enter my credit card number. God help me when she does.

The Jenny Manytoes Rating System


Jenny Manytoes, our polydactyl cat
  • When Jenny makes biscuits on a product she thinks she’s in heaven.
  • When Jenny purrs over a product she’s very happy.
  • When Jenny naps next to a product it’s okay with her.
  • When Jenny bunches her tail she can live with a product, but she has higher expectations.
  • When Jenny leaves it in the litter box….I don’t think I need to explain this one.
Posted in 4 Stars - Purr, Browsers, Shopping | Tagged | Leave a comment

Ski Safari rips the slopes

Posted on May 1, 2012 by

Spoiler alert! Ski Safari is about as clean and simple as a game can be. It’s fun to play even if you suck at it, your kids can play for hours when you need them to be distracted and you can play for hours when you need distraction as well. Only a dollar and worth every penny. Best Buy.

First of all, ski safari is not a skiing safari as the name might imply. Yes, the game does bring together animals, avalanches and skis as the developers promise in the App Store. However, in safaris you shoot the animals. And safaris usually take place in the jungle. So ski safari is an oxymoron.

Ski biathlon might be appropriate for a game with skiing and shooting, but there is no shooting in Ski Safari. You can catch animals and they add ski powers. But Ski Safari is simply wrong. Cool. A great marketing call. But wrong.

Ski Safari has one level but that level becomes more extraordinary the more you accomplish. The basic game is to outrun an avalanche. As long as you stay ahead of the encroaching snow, you continue to earn points. Unfortunately, a number of obstacles and slope changes make it difficult to stay ahead of the snow.

The game offers a number of challenges and assigns rank as you complete them. The higher your rank (and further you make it down the slope) the more you unlock new animals with new skill enhancements.

Navigation is simple. Touch the screen to ski, hold down to backflip and tap quickly to recover from a crash. You can only go in one direction, down, and your speed (and instability) increase the further you ski without problems.

The game keeps score several ways. You earn points for distance and beating obstacles. But you also keep track of accomplishments as well, such as ten successful backflips or catching five penguins in the air. Once you finish one set of goals, a new set appears, and Ski Safari keeps track of your progress as you repeat the course.

Enhanced skills such as the flame boost help you get further away from the avalanche but they also make it harder to spot rocks and trees in time to avoid them.

As you rack up experience and accomplishments, you also release new animals, such as birds or penguins (or yeti). However, you don’t want to kill these animals, you want to catch them to add new abilities, including turbocharging and flame boosting.

Graphics are spectacular. Yes the characters are cartoonish, but at game play speeds, the colors and characters combine to stimulate visual enjoyment. I also have to say that this game really invokes the rush of speed in a way few other games can.

The game is easy to learn. It involves little more than mastering eye and finger communication. The only trick is to recognize the next ski jump or obstacle and know when to jump and when to roll. And your children will master the game far more quickly.

Jenny Manytoes rates Ski Safari

Jenny Manytoes would make biscuits all over Ski Safari. It’s bright, it’s fast and it takes me at least an hour to clean her paw prints off my iPad screen after she plays.

The Jenny Manytoes Rating System

Jenny Manytoes, our polydactyl cat
  • When Jenny makes biscuits on a product she thinks she’s in heaven.
  • When Jenny purrs over a product she’s very happy.
  • When Jenny naps next to a product it’s okay with her.
  • When Jenny bunches her tail she can live with a product, but she has higher expectations.
  • When Jenny leaves it in the litter box….I don’t think I need to explain this one.
Posted in 5 Stars + Best Buy, Arcade Games, Entertainment, Games | Tagged , | Leave a comment