A Green Mushroom

Creatures Such As We is another interactive novel from Choice of Games and again I really enjoyed it. I guess I've never truly outgrown the choose your own adventure game and I love this modern incarnation of it. Creatures Such As We finds you as a tour guide of a space station on the moon.  As your next group of tourists show up you learn that they're the main development team of your favorite video game.  The story goes from there. It's hard to review the story in any real way since it's a choose your own adventure game and can go a bunch of different ways.  That being said, I was happy with the story that was told in my playthrough. If it sounds at all interesting I suggest you check it out !

I love mobile games but unfortunately for me most of them are little time waster games.  I love the ones that really dig in and try to do something new and, honestly, I browse the app store every Thursday for new releases but most games aren't this. A few weeks ago I had a run of Thursdays where nothing looked interesting.  So... I resorted to the "Top Charts" gaming section and picked up a couple games there I hadn't tried. Mostly these were duds but a few of them have been fun enough to keep playing. Alto's Adventure is a low key take on infinite runners.  You're a skiier going fast down a hill trying to catch caribou (or something) and your only controls are tap to jump or tap and hold to backflip.  If you're looking for a new infinite runner or just a game that's fun in small 1-2 minute bursts then Alto's Adventure might be for you. Goblin Sword is a sidescrolling platform/adventure game.  It has some basic fighting and platforming ...

Card Crawl is a diamond in the rough.  By rough... I mean the Apple App store and by diamond... I mean a good game. Card Crawl is kind of like playing through a tactical solo dungeon crawl... with cards.  It's also a little bit like solitaire?  I feel like I'm not doing a good job here.  Stick with me, the game is good. What happens is you are dealt a hand of four cards and you have to manage them.  They're in the middle area which represents the dungeon.  There are six types of cards in the dungeon and a few ways to deal with them.  The card types are shield, sword, coin, potion, special ability, and monster.  All of the card types can be dragged down into the section around your character, but the catch is that you only have two hands and one backpack.  This means only three items can fit on your character at any time.  Monsters, on the other hand, can be attacked with swords, get hit by special abilities, be defended against wi...

It looks like we've come full circle.  Apple is now advertising games that are "Pay Once and Play." It's so weird that we have to come up with a term to talk about games you buy once and then play forever.  Every game used to be that way, but in this world of crazy amounts of DLC and in-app purchases it is no longer the norm. I'm actually happy to see this.  It's finally a backlash against the predatory in-app purchase model that so many games seem to take.  Not all in-app purchase models are bad, I don't hate them categorically.  But some of the games out there might as well be slot machines.  They're the ones giving gaming a bad name right now. When DLC or in-app purchases are done correctly, they can be great.  But when they're done poorly they can just be there to take peoples' money. I hope Apple keeps promoting games like this.  Maybe it will help draw some attention away from the "games" that are only there to take...

I should really write about all the health/fitness apps I use, but for right now I want to talk about MyFitnessPal.  The others might come up in the course of writing this anyway. One of the things to do when you're trying to get healthier or change your diet is to start counting calories.  Since I'm doing that right now I wanted to write about this app because it's the best calorie counter that I've found. It's an app and also a website.  All the information syncs between the two. It has a huge library of food that is easily searchable.  Any user can submit new food to it.  Other users can then confirm nutritional info as correct and it will end up in their general library for everyone to use. The last time I used it was over 6 months ago and since then they've added a new feature.  Scanning barcodes!  I can't believe how easy this makes it to track calories.  Just point your phone at the barcodes of food or ingredients as you pull t...

I love to support indie games.  Indie developers aren't afraid to take a new idea and run with it.  Most of the time I find cheap indie games on steam or my ipod touch to try out.  There are all sorts of free demos on both services and a full copy of an indie game is almost always under twenty dollars.  Many are priced around a buck. If you aren't afraid of wading through some bad games the other option is to play flash games online.  The amount of free games online is amazing but finding high quality games can be a challenge. This is where Kongregate comes into play.  It's the best  flash game site that I've ever found. Kongregate has a rating system to help filter through all the junk games.  The community rates games and the site lets me sort by top rated and most played.  Every gaming distributor needs to be able to sort by rating and being able to sort by number of plays is like icing on the cake.  This is one area in which...

I have the Kindle app for reading on my ipod touch and I absolutely love it.  I hate the default settings, but I love the app.  It's the app that I use the most on my ipod touch, which is saying something.  I have all sorts of games and entertainment on my ipod touch and yet most of my time is spent reading on it. The Kindle app links to your Amazon.com account which allows for easy purchasing of digital books.  Most of the books are cheaper in digital form than they are in paperback.  I found one of my favorite trilogies for $9.99 which is the cost of one of them in paperback.  Not only that, but I've found that a lot of authors have free digital copies of the first book in a series in an attempt to get new readers. Any book available in the Amazon Kindle store can be tried for free.  There is a buy button and a sample button.  The sample will download the first portion of the book to the application for free.  It's like browsing new b...

As a follow up to this weekend's post on impulse buys I would like to point out that the app store needs some work. There is no good way to sort search findings in the app store.  In my opinion, this is a huge problem. I would love to buy more games for my ipod touch and I'm sure they want to sell them to me too.  But, I want to see a list of every game in their entire system sorted by customer rating and I can't.  I have wanted this from day 1.  If I could do this chances are extremely high that I would buy a ton of games near the top of that list. Instead, I am stuck dealing with "what's hot" or the "featured" apps.  I can find the "top 25" but what does that really mean?  Does anyone know?  None of these sections of the app store are bad by themselves, but without a sorting tool in the search function they greatly frustrate me.  This is because they are close to what I want but not quite good enough.  I don't want to see what...