iPhone Tips and Tricks

Posted on February 2, 2012 by root

iPhone Tips. In this section we are going to publish unusual and up-to-date tips helping to install, use and optimize the Apple gadgets.

iPhone and iPad are the best-sellers among application-based gadgets offering a lot of unique services and tools. Developers of iPhone apps have managed to create an application being handy practically for every life situation. It is getting harder and harder year by year to imagine a situation for which at least one relevant application for iPad or iPhone hasn’t been designed.

In a case you are interested in reading the articles titled as “Useful and Underestimated Applications”, “GymPact on iPhones” or “Best Home and Personal Safety iPhone Apps”, you will find these texts by following these links.

iPhone Tips and Tricks
All Tips and Tricks

Grand Theft Auto 3: red-hot and already in App Store

Posted on January 16, 2012 by root

Usually, we do not release any news when a certain game arrives in the Apple App Store. However, this time we are not talking about just any game. For the first time ever, Rockstar North has completely converted Grant Theft Auto 3 from the PC to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. It is a full-fledged version of the game that is almost identical to what we were all feverishly playing and going crazy over way back in 2001.

“Saying that GTA caused a furor in 2001 is an understatement. This game is among those few titles that have driven the electronic entertainment industry ahead. The game has everything: complete freedom of actions, a three-dimensional world, a natural time-of-day change, a whole fleet of various motor vehicles, never-ending chases, and skirmishes. The decision to release the iOS version of the game was in honor of its 10th anniversary. Thank You, Rockstar Games!”

From a press-release

The surprising thing is that instead of downloading GTA3, you are still reading this article. The price of the app is only $4.99, and it is already available in the App Store worldwide. Buy it, enjoy it, wreck virtual havoc, and cause chaos and destruction. The game review is already on its way.

Grand Theft Auto 3: $4.99 [iTunes link USA]

youtube: Grand Theft Auto 3

Save the pencil: inter-stationery conflicts

Posted on January 3, 2012 by root

Save the Pencil is a brain twister with a geometrical twist. No, no one will make you calculate angles and sines. However, you will engage in plenty of exercises that involve outlining hostile rulers and staples using straight lines. This seemingly simple task downplays the complexity of the game.

The game’s main hero is a small, big-eyed pencil that you will need in order to go through all of the destinations on paper and gather as many stars as possible. If you look down upon this task as one fit for kindergarten children, you are underestimating the complexity of the game. On your way, you will surely meet a malicious staple, an unpredictable ruler, or some other kind of stationery. If the pencil runs into one of these items, you will inevitably fail that game level. It is unclear what the piece of wood with a slate has done wrong to them, but you better avoid any objects on the piece of paper. The game’s developers have added dots of several different colors and allowed staples to move in order to give you a bit of a challenge with levels that would otherwise seem too simple.

It is a pity that the mini tutorial here is not interactive but just features old-school text with explanations. Although an interactive tutorial is not critical, it would allow one to start playing right away without having to spend time reading.

When you begin the game, you start moving on the paper from the green dot. You need to go through all of the blue dots in a manner that will allow you to gather the maximum number of stars. Later on, yellow dots through which you can draw lines as many times as you wish will appear in the game. Then, truly hardcore stuff will begin to come at you including dots that move and switch on and off, erasers, rulers, knife switches, and a whole bunch of other items. Every new sheet of paper will introduce you to new rivals and a set of gameplay novelties. The game will seem simple at the beginning of the level. Later, everything will start moving, and making your way to the goal will not be easy.

In terms of graphics, Save the Pencil does not aim for a distinguished position among its shiny HD colleagues. The handwriting style is tidy and pleasant, but there is nothing fancy about it. The sound quality, however, is surprisingly good. The event sounds and background music are both very pleasant. You may find this funny, but I personally really like the star animation with music at the end of the levels.

Looking at screenshots of the game for the very first time, I didn’t expect anything interesting from it, but something made me download the game and try it out. Now I can tell that Save the Pencil is quite a good brainteaser whose developers have even managed to somehow vary the events and gameplay. For example, at the end of the first sheet of paper, a Big Boss Staple is waiting for you. To get rid of it, you’ll need to cross lines on him while dodging the small staples. Moreover, the levels where your rivals move parallel with the pencil step-by-step just cannot be completed on the first attempt. The second attempt will not help you either; at first, you will need to suffer some bumps and figure out how these damn staples tend to move. Then there are the erasers that are striving to erase all bonus stars and leave you with nothing. So, you will need to play ahead of the curve.

The summary will be simple – buy Save the Pencil without a doubt if you like these kinds of brain twisters. Among games of this genre, original ones with a quite a diverse gameplay are rare to find. Finally, for those who are really cautious, the developers of the game have created a free trial version.

Gameplay: 5, Difficulty:4, Controls: 5, Graphics:3, Sound: 5, Price/Quality Ratio: 4, General Score: 4

[App Store] One Man Army

Posted on December 16, 2011 by root

Let me call your attention to an interesting representative of the contemplative games genre — Turret Defense. As a lonely kamikaze, you will have to defend the last stronghold of mankind from havoc and monsters gone wild using your wide chest as well as some sand sacs and automatic turrets. The game, which makes the reality around you seem completely uninteresting, also offers the option to actively participate in slaughtering all of those “cuties.” And that is just right: automatic guns themselves are not enough for all of them.

To tell you the truth, before this moment, I was not interested in the “pull out the weapons and watch your slowly crouching enemies get out on their way” kind of games. I was more about intensive action games or mind-boggling brain twisters. However, the developers of Tickled Pink Games do not disappoint us by offering an interesting mix of arcade shooter and turret defense. That is just what is needed – the game will challenge you with both thinking and shooting tasks.

To play the game, you stand at the bottom of the screen behind the sacs of sand and with a machine gun in your hands. Around you, there are all kinds of ruins and wreckage and a curvy path. All sorts of nasty beasts start moving through these paths towards you. Their attacks are clearly separated into “waves” with several-second-long breaks separating them for the purposes of a turret installation or upgrade and self-healing. The most important thing to remember is to keep the enemy away from the center of the city where mutants are planning to carry out some kind of insidious plan. Oh and, by the way, it would not be a bad idea to stay alive as well. The game’s authors allow you to shoot back at monsters in 36 different levels grouped by zones.

To successfully keep the monsters at bay, you only need to do two things. These are shooting and keeping your eyes on the weapons. And you need to do all of this quickly; a stronger enemy takes the weapons’ firepower onto himself, and you need to participate in shooting him down as well as killing those smaller monsters crawling near you. With all of this, you need to remember to buy first-aid kits if you do not want to end the game with your own death. There is also very little time for thought-out weapon placement and upgrades. If you let too many monsters in during a whole period, then the game will stop.

In addition to various shooting and exploding automatic weapons, there is a small personal arsenal offered to each player including a machine gun with a never-ending number of bullets, a flame thrower, a rocket launcher, and some other small stuff for killing enemies. Well… you have enough weapons to have fun.

The game is nicely designed with simple but clean graphics and unobtrusive background music. The only thing I didn’t like were the fire-related special effects. The explosions look like dull yellow flashes. The developers put most of their efforts into the diverse selection of monsters and their personal traits. And of course endless explosions and other kinds of visual effects are also included in the game.

Controlling a small personal war is quite easy but not always comfortable: the machine gun’s cross hair is controlled by a finger that moves all around the screen and covers the enemies. The very same thing inhibits precise targeting. For example, when aiming at a bunch of enemies, you may miscalculate the target and cover a wall with bullets while wondering why the mutant walks calmly around you as if he feels nothing. Luckily, the developers made an attempt to fix this problem and added alternative controls. Now, you can shoot while keeping your fingers near the bottom of the screen.

Besides that user interface, the icons are quite small, and it is not always clear if you have changed the weapon upon pressing the respective button. Such glitches lead to problems. For example, it sometimes seems that you have pressed the grenade button, but it turns out that it would not fly. After pressing the button one more time, everything works. However, all of these problems completely disappear when playing the game on an iPad with its big screen.

Turret Defense is quite an interesting and engaging game. The game’s action component is also great: you will never get bored while watching the weapons at work. And for those who love simple tactic games, it provides an excellent opportunity to practice complicating mutants’ lives by skillfully placing automatic cannons. With all of these activities and explosions, the game does not seem dull and monotonous unlike the “thoroughbred” games of this genre. I definitely recommend this game to those of you who love arcade shooters and turret defense – this mix provides the game with the ability to ignite the interest of quite a considerable audience of gamers.

Game advantages:

- The ability to participate actively in slaughtering monsters

- A Fast-paced and highly addictive game

- Intuitive controls

Game disadvantages:

- Not the most outstanding graphics around

Gameplay: 5, Difficulty: 4, Controls: 4, Graphics: 4, Sound: 4, Price/Quality Ratio: 5, Total Score: 4

youtube: One Man Army

Cut The Buttons: Scissor Hands

Posted on November 26, 2011 by root

The ever-growing amount of software available in the Apple App Store does not always benefit the ordinary user. One can only find a truly worthy game among the half-a-million apps in the event that it has earned a spot among the top 10 paid games. A random App Store search will most likely not be helpful either. Only rarely can one find an exemplary game such as Cut the Buttons. This colorful and engaging game is somewhat reminiscent of Fruit Ninja and even surpasses it with some of its features.

Game instructions

The gaming task seems trivial at a first glance: you have to Cut the Buttons on pieces of cloth as they appear on the screen. You must also catch the falling buttons in a wooden cup that you control with your finger, which is how you earn points. You also earn bonuses for each cup that you successfully fill with buttons.

All illusions about the ease of playing the game fade away just minutes after launching Cut the Buttons. This arcade game’s difficulty lies in its game controls. You must control the scissors, which are constantly located on the screen, with two fingers and also cut the buttons in this way. The movements are so realistic, and the sounds are so familiar that a minute of playing Cut the Buttons can easily turn into a whole hour. You better make sure to set an alarm to remind you when to stop playing so that you do not wind up getting lost in this game for several hours of your life.

This arcade game actually features two gaming modes: arcade mode and classic mode. In the arcade mode, you need to cut as many buttons as possible during a certain duration of time. In the classic mode, you basically need to do the same thing but with progressively more complex button-cutting tasks and without missing more than three buttons. Regardless of the gaming mode, you will stumble upon all kinds of rivets and snap fasteners that cannot be cut. If you cut them by mistake, the scissors will become blunt, resulting in a reduced level of accuracy when aiming to cut a button.

Cut the Buttons is not just an engaging arcade game for children and adults but also a perfect example of what multitouch games for the iPhone and the iPad should be like. The game has no plot, which would prevent the brain from turning off and finally relaxing while playing the game, and no small details . On the contrary, everything in the game is big and bright. Moreover, the game features the ability to continue playing from any point where you left off and uses the sensitive iGadgets’ touch screens to their maximum capacity.

This is how the scissors look when they have been damaged by snap fasteners.

Game advantages:

- Engaging gameplay

- High-quality details and effects

- High-quality sound and a great soundtrack

- Multiplayer mode on the iPad

Game disadvantages:

When playing on the iPhone, it is not comfortable to move the button-gathering cup around the screen.

Advice:

- Try pressing display as little as possible since your fingers may get tired.

- You can tap the buttons in game menus, not only cut them.

- Playing will be easier if you learn how to cut off at least three buttons with one move.

- Try different moves and combinations with the scissors. They can be used, not only for cutting, but for hooking up and single-blade cutting as well.

youtube: cut the buttons: scissor hands