1st Impressions

In this resource management game, you run a restaurant.  You start out small with hot dogs.  Orders are graphics showing with or without ketchup.  As sales increase, you upgrade to adding mustard.  Make more profit and you can upgrade to burgers and fried food.  Plenty to keep your little fingers busy.  At each level, you get a goal for that level.  As you expect, they get increasingly more difficult.  To make it a bit easier, you can make up orders ahead of time.  This is a nice benefit over some competing products.  But it really works well here.  The faster you serve correct orders, the better your tips.  This adds to your later ability to computerize, purchase advertising, and ultimately become more of a businessman entrepreneur and less of a short order cook.  All things considered, this is a good game.  If you want to check it out, there is a free light version.

Iro is a challenging puzzle game. At $0.99, it offers about 50 levels divided between tournament and puzzle types. The goal us to tilt your phone so that the pieces fall in a particular direction in order to get three or more pieces of the same color to combine…and to do this to clear the pieces in a certain number of moves. I found the game to be mire of a frustration than a challenge though. The new concept of this type of puzzle was something that I could not get my old brain wrapped around. But at a buck, younger minds that like puzzles may want to take a small risk on it.

Touch KO is a new release from Chillingo.  Pardon the pun, but thus app packs a punch.  As the training mode shows, you can block, dodge, punch, do upper cuts, combo punches, and so forth.  These are all done with thumb gestures or, in the case of dodging a punch, by moving your iPhone.  The graphics are amazing.  The rapping background music can be turned off in case you desire your own playlist.  Quick play modes are good for a quick fight.  Career mode let’s you customize your character and track his progress.  You can play as a guest, or log in and share your stats on the leader board.  This game is probably the best and most complex arcade style game that I have ever played.  It is currently on sale for $2.99 in the app store.  If you like these types of games, you should really grab thus before the price goes up.

Ancient Tomb is a maze adventure. It reminds me a lot of a graphical version of the mazes in the old Infocom text adventures. As you find the way into the maze, you find articles that can be used on your quest. The game has two control modes. You can use swipe gestures or button overlays like what is displayed in the screen shot. In case you are like me and find the gesture controls to be opposite of what you expect, you can reverse them. The goal of the game us to locate the burial chamber. Three levels of difficulty impact the game via the watchfulness of the guards. At $1.99, the game offers a limited amount of game play though. As such, it is probably not going to last too long on my iPhone.

Big Brother Hamster Soup is “the app for that” if you are a fan of the Big Brother reality series.  I confess, watching the “hamsters” is a guilty pleasure of mine.  This $1.99 app is a requirement for any fan of the show.  The app consists of  three main areas.  The first is access to “The Daily Dish”, a daily summary of what all happens in the house.  Clicking on a headline brings you to a full page of the story (the bottom right photo).  The second area of the application is live postings from the Joker’s Updates.  This is basically the play-by-play of those that watch the feeds all day.  The final area is an index of cast members and their biographies.  Little icons in the corner of their photos indicate who has been evicted so far, who is nominated for eviction, and who the current head of household is.  Tapping on their icon brings up a short bio and important recent dates in the house where they were winners of something or did something of note.

Because the feed updates would be constant, I would not want this to have push technology.  I would, however, think it would be cool to have some kind of notification of the major events in the house.  Five or six alerts throughout the week would be nice.  Other than that, the only other thing I would wish for is for the live updates to refresh whenever you tap that icon on the bottom.  Right now, the info is displayed for each of the categories when you first tap on the icons, or tap their heading banner, but it would be a bit more intuitive to me if it also worked on the bottom icons.

Overall, the app is well rounded.  Basic bios give an overview of the characters and a historical recap of their recent activity, the Daily Dish gives you daily recaps between the Thursday live shows, and the up-to-the-minute info from the live feeds provides you with all the detail you could ever want without having to be married to the internet streaming.  Not only is this cheaper than paying $15 to watch a lot of flames and sleeping, but it is also available when you are not at your PC and saves you a lot of time.

Besieged is a $1.99 castle defense game.  You control a group of archers defending the castle.  As you are attacked by skeletons, you use your archers to take them out.  There is a time lag between when you launch your arrow(s) and when they arrive though, so you have to time your shots based on the speed of the attackers.

While the game works, I found it a bit limited.  Other games in this price range (or even less, like Defender Chronicles on sale now for $0.99) offer a lot more in the way of defenses.  I hate to give bad reviews, but there is really no comparison between the depth of this game and something on the order of Defender Chronicles.

Allied Aces: Stunt Pilot is a fun little $0.99 game.  Your goal is to fly your place through the hoops that are somehow hanging in the sky.  Control is simple.  You swipe up and down on the left side of the screen to increase or decrease speed.  Doing the same on the right side of the screen adjusts your direction.  If you flip all the way around, the plane flies in the other direction.  There are also stars that you can collect by flying into them.  Be careful not to fly into the edges of the hoop though.  If you do, you crash and burn.

For a buck, it is a fun little game, but it only kept my interest for a short period of time.  I’m just not that good at the arcade types of games.  The developer is working on other flying games, but I wish that instead of different games, this one would get some more depth.  Perhaps some different planes or different types of missions or something.

Contacts Plus is free for the next 24-hours.  For free, it’s a great deal. It is the perfect replacement for the built-in contact app.  Not only does it show contact photo, number, and address in the index listing, but it allows you to group your contacts and alerts you to your contacts birthdays.  Tapping on a selection will offer you the opportunity to call them, email them, or SMS them.

Contacts Plus is normally $1.99 in the app store.  It adds a lot of additional functionality that really should have been included in the iPhone OS.  You can fix that oversight for free though if you hurry.

Farm Frenzy is a fun little time/resource management game.  You test your management skills at managing a farm.  This could be anything from collecting a certain number of geese or eggs, to protecting your animals from bears, to building a cheese dairy.  A total of 45 challenging levels including several types of animals, buildings, and things to sell await you.

While Farm Frenzy is $4.99, a free light version is available.  If you are a fan of time/resource management games, I’d suggest checking out the free version.  Don’t be surprised if you find the challenge worth the price of the full product.

Polly’s Popping Parrots Reloaded is not your typical “match three or more” game.  Available for $1.99 in the app store, the game features, you guessed it, parrots that you have to “pop” instead of the traditional gems.  What makes the game different though is that you are playing against a chosen computer opponent or against a friend over bluetooth.  If you are not faster than they are, you get your lights turned out and/or your birds “scared” and they fly around and slow you down. If you are able to pop eight or more parrots at a time, you get to do the same thing to them.

While the game has these additional features for a unique twist, I would have been much happier with this game at a $0.99 price point unless you going to take advantage of the multi-player aspect of the game.  There is just too much competition in the “match the colors”  solo-player games to justify the higher cost.  I’d also love to see a more relaxed “endless mode” or something where you didn’t have to compete against something that thinks a lot faster than I do.