1st Impressions

Romance of Rome is a soon-to-be-released hidden object game from G5 Entertainment.  Both an iPhone and iPad version are expected to go live on the App Store later this week.

As with other hidden object titles from G5, this one has a nice story line.  Your goal is to help Marcus on an adventure of exploration that ultimately ends with claiming the hand of the beautiful daughter of the emperor.

The game consists of seven different adventure episodes that take place over 17 different locations around ancient Rome and total 30 different levels.  As you progress through the different levels, you earn money that can be used to purchase different items and are also given the opportunity to do favors for different people. These things combine to increase your standing in the community and your acceptability as a suitor to the emperor’s daughter.

At it’s core though, this is a hidden object game.  Objects in the location are very well hidden.  They may, for example, be seen from a slightly different angle in the location than what they are displayed in your table of items to find.  And, as with other G5 games of this genre, some objects can act upon other objects.  And some objects that you locate in one location can be used to act on an object in a different location.

All in all, the game plays well and meets the quality expectations of a G5 release.  The graphics are really nice on the iPhone 4 retina display, and the romantic angle of the story line is a nice addition.  I’m not sure what the price point will be, but I’d recommend this title to any fan of this genre of game.

I have to admit that I have been tied up for a while and have, to my chagrin, neglected this little jewel. It is by far one of the most in-depth RPGs that I have seen.

Pantheon Cycle is a first and foremost a turn based RPG that will bring you back to the old days of the solitary multiplayer games.

By that I mean that you are controlling different characters although having to rely totally on yourself – your friend with the WIFI connection is not coming to your aid.

I haven’t had time to spend more than just a few minutes with the game (which touts more than 30 hours of gameplay focussed more on fighting than dungeon crawling. My personal preference is to dungeon crawling, not fighting. I guess that comes from being beat up by my big brother growing up while I hid in actual tunnels we had under the eves of the house…LOL).

The game not only offers great music and art, but is possibly one of the most feature rich RPGs that i have encountered on my iPhone. Including multiple characters to control (each with their own skills and weapons) maps, and more NPCs than you could shake a stick at, this game seems to have it all for anyone sitting in a cubicle with the urge to gather up his “friends” and wreck dime bedlam during his lunch hour.

I wouldn’t wait too long to grab this up, however. For a very limited time the game is only $4.99 but that price will soon increase – possibly once it becomes universal and playable on the iPad as well.

As soon as the opening sound tract for this game started playing, I knew I was in for a good time.  I was not disappointed.  iCannon Hellfire is a new $0.99 release from BulkyPix.  As the story line goes, a comet has crashed on your planet and you are defending the energy source it provides from those that want to take it.  But it is pretty much an excuse to just blow things up.

The controls are very easy to grasp.  Tilt your iPhone to move the bullseye to a selected target and use one of your thumbs to then fire at it.  You have both a machine gun to shoot down troops, and a cannon to fire are armored things like tanks.

The game progresses over 20 different campaigns, but can also be played in mode.  As the game progresses, you can gain additional weapons and fortify your defenses.  With enough skill, you can even obtain invincibility.  My only suggestion for the game is the ability to adjust sound settings so that you had sound effects with less or no background music.  While I loved the sound tract and it reminded me of Fieldrunners or the A-Team, at times I found it distracting me from the quick reflexes needed to defend your position.

As a simple game, this one just works.  There is nothing complex about it and it’s use of the iPhone’s tilt and touch capabilities are a perfect fit for this platform.  The screen shots don’t do the game justice as it is difficult to fire with your thumbs while simultaneously hitting the home and power buttons to grab the image.

In Exclusion Zone – Anti Air Warfare, your goal is to defend your airport from incoming enemy planes and helicopters by launching missiles at them.  It is an easy goal, but not quite so easy to accomplish.  The incoming aircraft are moving at different speeds and coming in from different directions.  Getting the missiles launched in the right directions to that they intercept the aircraft that will be getting to your base first is a challenge.

The game controls are very simple and intuitive.  All you have to do is swipe from your missile launcher in the trajectory you want the missile to follow.  And this doesn’t have to be a perfectly straight line.

All told, there are six different types of aircraft ranging in both size and speed.  The battle takes place over 5 different maps.  As the game progresses, you move from a single launcher capable of one missile in the air at a time, to having bonus weapons of Electro-Magnetic Pulse devices and homing missiles.

This title is very addictive as a casual game and only cost $0.99.

Pocket Weather Pro wowed me. Literally. When the $3.99 app launched, an involuntary “Wow!” escaped my lips and, after just a couple minutes examining it’s features, it assumed the position of the only weather app on my iPhone and set the bar to which all other weather apps will be measured. It now resides on the top row of my first page of apps.

There are three things that really set this SBSH title apart from those that now must try to compete with it. The first thing is the wealth of information available to you. It not only displays current temperatures, wind speed and direction, and cloud/precipitation icons as you would expect, but also expected highs and lows for both actual and perceived temperatures (wind chill), visibility in miles, barometric pressure, dew point, percent chance of precipitation, and a ten day forecast. And that is just on one screen. There are also screens for detailed 10-day forecasts, graphs of actual and perceived temps for both highs and lows forecast over the next week by day, perceived and actual over the coming 12 hours by hour, and highs and lows historically by month for the last 12 months with rainfall amount and number of days with rain. All of these graphs allow you to slide your finger across them and get more details for that month, day, or hour. Full sunrise, sunset, and moon phase information, as well as worldwide earthquake data, is also available. About the only thing the app doesn’t cover is tidal information…and does it all for any airport in the world.

The maps section touches on the second thing that sets this app apart. You see, this app is the only one to get all this detailed information directly from METAR feeds from every airport worldwide. As such, when you pull up the maps feature and look at radar images, you can select and view the radar images from any airport in your vicinity. When I pull my location up, I not only have 8 different radars that I can look at, but after the app has been installed long enough to get a few updates, I can “play” the images and watch as the weather systems move.

As if the wealth of information collected and the number of sources available are not enough to impress, this weather app also adds themes. This allows you to download additional views of all this information to find the ones that provide the format and information selection that best suits your taste. The app comes with thee different views standard and another couple already available for download. Options include the ability to not only see what additional views are available directly from SBSH, but also can do a Google search for additional views.

Not only are there info buttons on each page explaining what the icons and data mean, but SBSH also has a forum for comments and inquiries on the app as well as a guide for creating your own custom weather feed and themes available for download. There is also a nice YouTube overview of the app. There is also a free lite version available for download. The extensive settings available not only allow you to change a lot of ways the data is displayed and select locations, but also has the options to not only “bump” to share configurations with friends, but also backup and restore your configurations on DropBox. As you dig deeper, you can find out all kinds of information about the airports around you and even links to arrival and departure times if available on the web. In short, they have pretty much thought of everything. You can also share your current weather information via email, Facebook, Twitter, print it, or ever save it to your image album or DropBox.

My recommendations for this app are few. While I live nowhere near the ocean, I think tide info would be a nice addition to the app. And, while weather alerts do display on your main screen, tapping on them sometimes just tells you the basic type of alert and not the full information that I have seen in other apps. At other times, perhaps a different location, you get full detail of the alert. It also does not send push notifications. I get enough weather alerts already from local news apps, but this would be a nice addition to the app. Also, while there seems to be a pretty full user manual for the Windows devices, I could not find one for the iPhone version, which seems to have a few less options available in the settings.

This is a truly marvelous app and definitely makes my Must Have list. If the rich feature list isn’t enough to get you to purchase the title, then consider that the developers have been based in Thailand working with a large children’s home in the Northern village of Hoay Maw. Supporting that effort alone is worthy of the $3.99 price tag.

If you, like me, are fascinated by the heavens, Hidden Sky is a must-have application.  It not only allows you to see the location and path of the sun, planets, and hundreds of other objects in the sky, but you can also see their locations based on some different date and time.

If you’d like to see this app in action, there is a nice YouTube video to give you a taste of it.  The interface is simple.  You can not only tap on an item that you “see” to find out a lot of information on it, but you can also go into the “catalog” and select an item and then follow the “arrow” that shows up on the screen to locate its current location.

Because this app heavily depends on your compass, it is important that you calibrate your compass in order to get the best results.  This only takes a few seconds.  Once that is done, it is also important to update the database of objects.  To do this, click on the “+” sign on the top of the screen and then the update status on the bottom of the next screen.  This short download updates the catalog in the app and gives you the most up to date information.

One of the really cool features is the animation feature.  Once you get some of the orbital paths displayed on the screen, you can tap the screen and then “scroll” left and right through time to see where objects are going to be along that trajectory.  If you want to see where and when the orbits of different planets align, for example, it is only a finger swipe away.

I had a lot of fun with this $4.99 app.  But, because the app is more focused on satellites than stars and constellations, I think it is missing a large potential audience.  If the catalog was updated with major stars, nebula’s, and constellations, I think the $4.99 price would appeal to a lot wider audience.  If you really are into communication satellites though, this app could really help.  As you can see in the photo to the left, it could have really helped my DirecTV installer in locating our dish so that the trees did not get in the way.  Without this though, he ended up trying a couple of different locations before he found one that worked.  This app is a perfect example for occasions like that.  Heavy users of GPS and satellite phones will also find this app very beneficial.  For the casual user though, it is going to have a short “that’s really cool!” factor that might not justify long-term use and the $4.99 price point.

In short, nobody does hidden object games like G5 Entertainment, and Treasure Seekers 2 truly exemplifies their standing as a leader in this field.  As a sequel to Treasure Seekers, this title does not disappoint.

Game play reminds me a lot of the aspects of The Mystery Of The Secret Portal 2 that I reviewed a while back.  Instead of having a list of things to find on a screen and then going on to the next screen once that is complete, this title uses a collection of objects to interact with other objects in a way that makes the game a lot more immersive.  For example, in the opening sequence, you find objects that are displayed on a wheel around a lock for a gate.  But finding those objects and dragging them to the lock, the lock is opened and you get access to the tower.

The game has a lot to offer.  There are both a relaxed/casual game mode and a more advanced and challenging mode.  The game encompasses fifty different scenes and mini-games in stunning retina quality.  All this takes place in 6 different canvasses to explore.  The iPhone version is priced at $4.99, and the iPad version is $6.99.

The only suggestions that I have for the game is that as the story line unfolds, text is displayed on the screen.  This text automatically fades as the story line continues with additional text.  There were times when this fading happened before my old eyes got all of the text read.  I wish the delay on each screen lasted a little while longer and would take a finger-tap to move on to the next screen.  And, with the price point of this item, I wish there was  a free lite version with the first couple of scenes in it so that folks could see first-hand how great the graphics and game play is.  I think once folks tried it, they’d be a lot more likely to purchase the title.

To celebrate the release of this title, the developers are having a contest.  All you have to do is go to the link on Facebook and follow the instructions there.  On the 20th, five different winners will receive a copy of the title.  Winning a free copy of the game is even better than a free lite version!

All in all, this title is a great example of what happens when great ideas are incorporated with great graphics.  If you ever played a hidden object game in a kids magazine and enjoyed it, I’d suggest check out this title.

Disco Tech is a maze game that takes you right back to the 70′s.  Priced at $0.99, this game consists of 15 different levels.  While that may not seem like much, their increasing difficulty makes this a game that will take you a while to get though.

The game offers two different views.  By using the larger view, you can actually see that the levels take on iconic shapes of the era.  The levels include a lot of depth and not only obstacles, but also switches and levers that must be accessed in order to complete the level.  These additional elements are what makes these 15 levels something that take a bit of time to get through.

If you like accelerometer based labyrinth games, this one will give you a challenge and is worth the $0.99.

Rocket Math is a $0.99 educational game with an unsurprising focus on math.  Your goal is to take math quizzes in order to earn money.  This money can then be used to customize your rocket.  By launching your rocket, you launch into another area with other math challenges.  These can be anything from matching certain types of coins, matching even or odd numbers, matching shapes, and so forth.  I’d suggest this for probably first and second graders.  While there are over 90 different rocket parts and 56 different math missions, I don’t think it is going to keep the attention of anyone over the age of 10 or 12.

The app is currently on sale for the $0.99 price.  Its regular price is going to be twice that.  If you have kids in the right age group, I can see where this would be a way of making learning math something fun.  If I had one suggestion, it would be to expand the target audience with different levels of problems.  Otherwise, the $0.99 price is likely more than you’d want to pay if you only have one child and they pick up these basic principles fairly quickly.

I love utility apps and camera apps on the iPhone.  ToonCamera is the latest that I’ve tried out.  It is an app for not only taking photos using the back-facing camera or front-facing camera and video, but also allows you to select items from your photo library.  It then takes these images and “cartoonifies” them.  I realize that isn’t a real word, but by decreasing the colors in the image, it ultimately turns the image into something that looks like a cartoon.

I really like the effects of this program.  By adjusting the brightness, contrast, and line thickness, you can produce up to nine different versions of the image.  Examples of there are in the second image in the review here.  The end results are really nice.  And, if you combine them with an app like Colorize, you could really make some nice results that would really help to make your images pop out of the background.  Combining it with AutoStitch could also provide some interesting results.  I also used PerfectPhoto, another $0.99 app that I to remove some of the noise artifacts from my “cartoon” image.

The front-facing camera is a nice option as it allows you to take some great images for use as an avatar on Facebook or something.  The live video recording with these effects is also cool to see.  It is these options and the ability to view all this live that sets this app apart from things like the “pencil paint” and “posterize” options of apps of other apps.  Once you get an image or video that you’d like to keep, you can save it to your camera roll, share it on FaceBook or Twitter, or email it to one of your contacts.

At only $0.99, I’d highly recommend this app for any photgrapher.  It makes my Must-Have list and will remain on my iPhone.  I would like make two suggestions to the developer though.  It would be nice if you could either zoom or crop images.  I’d also love to see where the effects were more in the way of sliders rather than presets so that finer control could be accomplished.