Sentinel 2

Okay, we have a plot line: Our Mars colony is toast and the aliens who destroyed it are headed for the Home World. You are captain of a drop ship that has been armed with some advanced weaponry to fend off the enemy hoards. What's a drop ship? Apparently, a ship that has been dropped on a beach and probably without a parachute because it can't fly. At least, I haven't been able to get it to lift off and I'm a pretty damn good Captain. So, what we have here is a tower defense game: two groups of towers, each connected by a grounded iron gate, that I can fortify to contain the Alien Menace. I also have a budget to do this. Sentinel 2 is a little like managerial accounting.

So, let's play! The battleground consists of a wharf attached to a desert isle with a few palms here and there. A deeply-dug trench forms a path angling along the shore, leading to the first gate. The first wave of invaders seems to be a hoard of giant cockroaches that swarm along the pathway and storm the gate. No problem: the gate is charged and it dispatches them like a bug zapper. Then, a bunch of soldiers dressed in WWII GI fatigues tries our defenses and we find that the bug zapper works on humanoids just as well as it does on insects. More cockroaches; more soldiers. After the third or fourth wave of soldiers, the gate is beginning to show some damage. The aliens have wised up and stopped sending the roaches. The next wave of soldiers smashes their way through the first gate. They damage the second. Again with the roaches! We know how this is gonna turn out, right? Gate 50 Roaches 0. Finally, soldiers break through the second gate and the game ends. I was able to get some missiles fired by tapping a lot of icons, and sometimes the ship glows a littler brighter but it NEVER moves.

That was the “campaign” setting. There is also a mission: to fend off a powerful warrior using limited resources. The warrior approaches. This guy is worth the price of the game. He has long legs, a slow, cowpoke swagger and an elongated chitinous skull. If John Wayne mated with the Alien, the kid would look like this when it grew up. But that's not all: he is carrying a glowing green hammer and he farts lightning! Any objective analysis would predict the early demise of this lone cosmic thug, but there is something about that walk. Our worst fears are realized: He smashes through the first gate in short order, farts a few sparks to celebrate, then assaults the second one. Here, he takes several direct missile hits but they serve only to fuel his rage. The gate comes down and the Alien Duke walks on. GAME OVER.

The hard core gamers will have fun with this one. For me, the learning curve is way too steep. Great graphics and probably one of the coolest aliens in gamedom.

ScreenShots



App Store Description

Sentinel 2: Earth Defense - a premium Sci Fi strategy game.

It's war, and this time it's too close to home. The Martian mission may be over, but the aliens haven't finished playing space invaders yet.

Extraterrestrial eyes have turned to a new target: they want Earth, and you're the one that has to say 'no'!
Welcome to the future of Tower Defense.

Sentinel 2: Earth Defense expands upon the acclaimed gameplay of Sentinel: Mars Defense. The action takes place across varied, lushly rendered Earth environments, and the alien assault force has grown more vicious than ever. Luckily, human turret technology has also advanced, and the ship weapons system provides a spectacular new way to eradicate invaders!

NEW IN SENTINEL 2

- Unleash the Sentinel's incredible ship weapons system - if you've got the power to do so...
- Deploy mobile attack drones to harass the enemy and augment static defenses.
- Construct boosters to buff your offense, and upgrade to top-tier towers for devastating special moves!
- Pit yourself against previously unseen members of the star spawned horde.
- Mission mode provides quick tactical challenges. Beat a scenario to earn achievements!
- Full online high scores, achievements, friends and chat using OpenFeint
- Exclusive new music written by Specimen A
- OS3.0 iPod Music Player (OS3.0 or higher required)

CLASSIC SENTINEL FEATURES

- Specialised structures and units provide unique tactical gameplay.
- Use the landscape and destructible defenses to maximize the effectiveness of your weapons.
- Resource harvesting and interest system adds a new dimension of risk and reward.
- Assault mode provides hours of play; endurance mode is an endless challenge.
- Visually stunning environments, towers and enemies with fluid zooming and scrolling.

Meteor Blitz

If you liked Asteroids, you will love Meteor Blitz. If you didn’t, maybe not so much. Meteor Blitz is Asteroids for Century 21. Instead of white line drawings against the blank cathode ray background of deep space, we get gorgeous, crystal clear million-color graphics and seamlessly smooth animation. It’s a space shooter game, the objective of which is to blow stuff up before you collide with it or get blown up by hostile ships. Two ghostly joysticks direct the action. The right stick controls speed, boost, and vector; the left controls weaponry and offers a choice of fire, ice or the green stuff that the aliens shot at Will Smith in Independence Day. If you want to play your own audio, go for it. I chose New Morning by Placebo because its ominous, repetitive drone seemed perfect for the visual environment. The rules are simple: if it moves, shoot it, smash it into chunks, then blow up the chunks. Those of you working your way up in a bank or a tech firm will catch on right away. And to complete that analogy, whatever you destroy leaves a corpse in the form of a bright yellow ring that can be used to buy ship and weapon upgrades or to unlock other world environments. At the end of each phase The Boss shows up, and yes, The Boss too must die.



Everything about Meteor Blitz is superb, from the graphics and audio to the BMW I-Drive style control sticks. The problem is, for me anyway, there is no payoff. Destroying stuff just brings more and bigger stuff to destroy. Cool stuff, like space snakes and pointy spacecraft, but after a while I want to land. The default planet is a green, Earth-like place with lots of oceans and continents. I should be able to destroy some enemy ships, pulverize a few meteors, then head for a spaceport bar where I can pound a pint or two of Rigellian Wormhole Ale and maybe start a fight with some of the locals. Bustin’ space rocks constantly just starts to seem like prison. Also, just like Asteroids, the ship remains stationary and the background moves. This almost gives the illusion of flight, but mostly it feels like I’m glued to a point trying to dodge stuff that is coming at me.



Still, Meteor Blitz easily scores 5 out of 5. It’s a brilliant space shooter game and it’s well worth a buck ninety-nine.

Dolphin Experience

Dolphin experience is a strange app. It’s not a bad app, it’s just that there’s not much to do. Basically Dolphin experience is like having a couple of pet dolphins. You feed them, play with them, interact with them, and that’s pretty much it. They never die or get sick, so there is no goal that you are trying to reach. There are a lot of pros to this app, but more cons. I’ll start with the cons.

First off, most apps like this are a lot more fun. The main problem with this app is that it’s too boring. The only things you can do are watch the dolphins, feed them, have them play with a ball, and jump through hoops. Trust me, it gets pretty boring after a while. Another big problem with the app is that there are no directions. You are left to figure out how to do everything by your self. All though there’s not that much to learn, it would still be helpful. For example, the app summary on the app store says that you can perform 18 different tricks with the dolphins, but I only see two tricks that you can do.

Overall, the app lacks involvement. There’s not much you can do but feed, play and interact with them. Now to the pros. One thing I immediately noticed about the app was the great graphics. The graphics are some of the best I’ve seen on the iPod touch. You can also choose from 3 environments to play with the dolphins. And at each environment you can choose from 4 different times of the day to play with them. So really you are getting 12 environments, because each environment is different, at different times of the day. The sounds are great to, mimicking real dolphin cries and water sounds.



The app also loads really fast, which is a surprise because the graphics are so good. Overall though, I think the cons outweigh the pros. There just isn’t a lot to do in this app. You watch them, feed them, and play with them in two different ways. Maybe if you really like dolphins you’ll like this app, but otherwise, I think you’re better off keeping your $1.99.

ColorSplash: St. Basil’s Never Looked Better!

ColorSplash is one of two simple and powerful photo editing apps from Pocket Pixels, Inc. Like its companion, Juxtaposer, it’s a one-trick pony. ColorSplash converts any graphic to a gray scale overlay that can be swiped away to selectively paint your photo with color. Although it comes with four detailed tutorial movies, using it is nearly intuitive. Choose a color photograph from your library. The photograph is imported into the app, where a grayscale copy is made and overlaid on the original. Then you get to the fun part: pick an area to colorize, tap it, and the gray vanishes to let the true color come shining through. ColorSplash seems to read your mind, stopping the color at the edges of the selection. For details, spread your fingers to enlarge your work and pinch them to contract. An infinite undo tool erases mistakes. Use the accelerometer to instantly change the view to portrait or landscape. Controls at the bottom edge make it easy to switch from colorizing to graying with a tap. A zoom-pan tool turns off the editing functions, but once you get the hang of working in the app it’s easier to just use the two-finger move to pan, and spread or pinch movements to zoom. Both color and grayscale functions can use fader brushes that allow just a touch of color to show through. For areas that show very little contrast with the background layer, tap the red dot and your colorizing brush spreads a red fog that helps you define boundaries. The fog is gone when the finished work is saved. Sessions can be saved to continue later, and finished work can be posted to Flickr, Facebook or Twitter.

To test the app I chose two cultural icons, one American and the other Russian. The ’57 Chevy was almost too easy. I tapped the car in two places and about 80% of it appeared in color with very little over-spray on the background. I zoomed the photo, wiped color onto the rest of the Chevy, cleaned up a few background areas and it was ready to save. Not bad at all for a total n00b! St. Basil’s was a little more of a challenge with its ornate onion domes topped with gleaming gold spheres. Here, the mega-zoom function came in handy. With a few swipes, I was able to greatly enlarge the image, trace the curves and turn the bright blue Moscow sky a somber Soviet gray while exposing the brilliant colors of the domes.





ColorSplash is a testament to the rebirth of tightly-written code inspired by the App Store and the iPod touch. A wish list might include sepia-tone and blue filters for the backgrounds and gamma adjustment for the color, but ColorSplash is superb the way it is.

Warp Reality With Juxtaposer, The Photo Mashup App

Want to graft a baboon head with rattlesnake eyes and tongue onto your ex-girlfriend’s body? There’s an app for that and it’s called Juxtaposer. Load two photos into Juxtaposer and you have your own pocket Island Of Dr. Moreau. The first photo loads full-size to form the base for your evil work. Choose a second photo, and it loads in thumbnail size, ready to be shaped, re-sized, and moved into position on the base. The final result can be saved and used as a base for a second round of pixel mutation.

Juxtaposer comes from Pocket Pixels, developers of the mighty ColorSplash. Both use a similar interface. Switch between erase and un-erase or between move/pan and edit with finger taps or on-screen controls. Resizing is accomplished with pinch and spread movements and the final image can be moved into position by sliding it with a finger. Tools abound. More than you will probably use and too many to describe in detail here. Besides the red fog (for editing areas of low contrast) and softening brushes familiar to ColorSplash users, Juxtaposer provides stamping ability, image-switching, a transparency tool to aid positioning, and image flipping capability. Juxtaposer will also allow multiple top images to be added to the same session and it will replace one top image with another. The ubiquitous Facebook/Flickr/Twitter post is also available directly from the app.

I found the erase function of Juxtaposer much different and more challenging than the one in ColorSplash. Erased lines have a severe case of the jaggies, requiring careful resizing and frequent use of the infinite undo function. Juxtaposer has the ability to render in 1026 pixels instead of the default 512, but the help pages warns that this slows the editing process considerably so I didn’t use it. With patience and practice, I was still able to achieve acceptably n00b-level results, but I gave up on importing that shroud-like thing that frames Brak’s head. Sorry, Brak. Hope it wasn’t a body part. Beavis was much easier; there isn’t all that much to Beavis. So, here we have a photo of what might have been at that Jersey wedding if two celebrity invitations hadn’t been lost in the mail:



Juxtaposer is a great app for quick and easy photo mash-ups, and with some practice, it can be used to create near-photoshop quality montages.

iCensor App Review

Whether you’re after a little self-guided training for that dream job in network news or just have the urge to censor, iCensor from secretsquare is the app for you.Just import any screen shot, open one of the pages of classic censorship marks and get busy. Drop the mark on the photo, re-size and align it, tap the floppy disc icon (Has anyone actually used one of these in this century?) to save and that’s all there is to it.Your censored work is ready to show, post, or Email to your friends right from the app. iCensor comes with a full selection of marks for any censorship job, including redaction bars and blackouts, stamps, stars, skin blurs, a pixilated mosaic, the classic fig leaf, and Wendy O. Williams signature electrical tape in basic black and seductive red. Small versions of the bars and blackout are perfect for documents. The guys at Secretsquare sweated the details. Skin tones come in seven shades and check out the subtle texture and slight translucency of the electrical tape. Perfect for obscuring nipples! Who knew censorship could be this much fun?Working with iCensor is easy and intuitive, though like all skills, censorship takes a little practice. Import the photo with a few taps, pull up a page of graphics, tap one, and it slithers onto your photo ready to be sized and aligned. The marks are live until the completed work is saved. Pull them to expand and pinch to shrink. The width and length vary together, so document redaction is best done with multiple overlapping thin bars. With a little practice, these can be aligned perfectly to cover the text and the final result will be one long, smooth obfuscation.

iCensor is brilliantly designed and executed. It works exactly as advertised and it couldn’t be easier.The only flaw in the app is the size of the graphics once they appear on the photo.Even when shrunk to their limits, some of them (the fig leaf for example) are too big for iPod-sized shots. Download it today and use its powers for good or evil.

A Guttu Jump Pro

A guttu jump pro is a simple, addictive and fun game with one point. Basically you try to get the little monster as high as you can without falling. Fall even once and you will die.

You are allowed to bounce on three different platforms. Fixed platforms, moving platforms and rainbow platforms, which give you a little boost. You can also bounce on a variety of moving little bugs that are there to try to knock you off your path. You start out the game with three rocket packs that give you a short burst of speed upwards. There are refills that are available as you go, but keep in mind that you can only have three at a time, so you have to use them wisely. They are quite helpful in getting out of hairy situations like if you missed a platform and are about to fall. As you get higher the scenery will change from skyscrapers, to the sky, to outer space. There will also be less platforms the higher you go. There are restrooms that you can bounce into to take a little break, but they don’t do that much.



A recent update also added a checkpoint feature, which allows you to start where you left off from, instead of starting from 0 each time you fall. The game also allows you to play in either portrait or landscape mode. Once you do fall, you can play again, or you can post your score on a country scoreboard or even a world scoreboard. The scoreboards will show the player’s name, rank, score and country. I was quite proud of myself for getting a score in the 16,000’s which at one point ranked me as 4th best in the ever changing country scoreboard. The highest score belonged to somebody from South Korea and was in the 60,000’s. You can also post your score on Twitter and when the update comes out on October fourth, you’ll be able to post your score on Twitter too.



The updates are quite frequent and promise more features that will make this game even better than it already is.

Overall, this game is a simple, but challenging game, that is easy to play and will have you coming back for more.

ImpossiSquares App Review

Impossisquares from Crucial Development Studios is a simple game that combines co-ordination and strategy. You use the accelerometer to keep the orange square out of the path of four converging rectangular bars of different size. Two bars move vertically and two move horizontally. Touch one of the bars, or the border, with the orange square and the game is over. No pause button, no free zone, no power pills, no second or third lives. The game ends, your time is displayed, and you can start a new game. The goal is to beat your best time, and you can post your score on Facebook if you like.



The first few games ended in about a second, then I found the path out of the crushing bars. The trick is not to run away from the bars, but to move through them and wait them out when your square is out of the path. As you can see, they move beyond the borders and that gives you a small time advantage. They also change patterns and start moving faster after you’ve eluded them for five seconds or so.

I like simple games. If I have to think too much, I might as well be working. I found playing Impossisquares frustrating at first, but the more I played, the more I appreciated its challenge and brutal simplicity. I managed to get my score form .5 seconds to 29 seconds after about ten minutes, but once, the game stopped with a flash of light and brought up this score:

Impossisquares had somehow taken me 51 minutes into the past! I’m not sure how I did this, but I’m planning to write down some winning lottery numbers next time I play.

Doodle Jump: Classic Arcade Fun Re-invented for the iPod touch

Turning, simply-drawn graphics, a short learning curve, and familiar elements of classics like Frogger, Super Mario, and Space Invaders combine to make Doodle Jump by Lima Sky one of the most highly-rated games in the iTunes store. The game takes place on a sheet of graph paper.The only controls are tilt and tap. Help the Doodle Jumper, a friendly looking creature who could be the son of Q*bert and the great-grandson of Cryll , make his ascent into infinity by jumping from platform to platform and avoiding perils along the way.

At first, the green kosher dill-looking platforms are so closely-spaced that the game almost plays itself. Just tilt the iPod to move from side to side. The jumper leaps upward as soon as his feet hit the surface of a platform. Watch out for rotten logs. They split when he hits them and he will drop until he hits a solid platform or ends the play. Coiled springs on some of the platforms give the little dude some extra lift, and he has a propeller beanie and a jetpack waiting for him above to give him brief flights upward. You’ll also find some blue platforms that move laterally and gray platforms that move up and down to give extra maneuverability. The screen wraps, so you can drop the Jumper off the edge and bring him back immediately on the other side of the screen to continue his climb. The higher he climbs, the higher your score. Other features include the scores of Doodle Jump players that appear at the edge of the screen and the ability to post your scores to Facebook or Twitter.

Danger lurks in the higher altitudes: flying monsters that can bring the Jumper down with a touch, black holes in the graph paper that will suck him in, gold platforms that turn red and crumble after a second or so, and a flying saucer with an abduction ray. Monsters can be avoided by grabbing a protective bubble that usually appears a few levels below the threat and, with a tap; the Jumper shoots pellets out his snout that will bring down a monster or a saucer. Whether a pellet can eliminate a black hole is unknown. Firing anything into a black hole is risky, so if you try it and wind up trapped in a parallel universe where Fergie is your mom, Dick Cheney is your dad and you spend 65 hours a week writing Excel macros for a Cleveland accounting firm, don’t say you weren’t warned.



Although the graphics are simple and hand-drawn, the level of detail in Doodle Jump is astounding. The propeller on the beanie spins, flames shoot out of the jet pack, the Jumper’s spindly little legs retract when he jumps, the rips in the graph paper are realistic and crisply-rendered, and the goofy retro soundtrack is a perfect match for the action. Doodle Jump is a great game for either extended play or those activities-like phone calls or driving in Houston rush hour traffic-that don’t require our complete attention.

SAT Vocab Spinner App Review

Good thing that the makers of SAT Spinner chose to price it at $0.99, because what you get for your buck is not that much. Basically you get a dictionary with 400 words that are most likely to show up when you take the SAT test. The people who bought this app that are taking the SAT test thought that it was very helpful in preparing them for the vocabulary portion of the SAT.

There are four levels that range from easy, to medium, to hard and finally to extreme. Tap the Spin button and the app will shuffle all the words for you and pick a random one. Tap Select, and the Definition and the part of speech show up in a separate box. (For example; Verisimilitude: (n.) the appearance of truth; the quality of seeming to be true.) Press done, and then choose a different word, or scroll to sentence or variations and tap select. Choosing sentence will put the word that you selected into a sentence that will help you figure out the definition of the word. (Sentence: Even though the movie was based on a true story, the film lacked verisimilitude.) Choosing variations will give you a couple of variations of the words such as plurals and more. (Variations: Verisimilutudinous, verisimilar, verisimilarily.)

As I mentioned before there are four levels to choose from ranging from easy to extreme. The words in easy are quite simple, like moderate, humble, and domestic. Switch the level to extreme, and there are words that college professors probably do not know, such as obstreperous, foppish, parsimonious, and unctuous.

That’s pretty much all the app has to offer, but according to the makers they examined 50 actual SAT tests and picked the most occurring words. One suggestion for a future upgrade, is having a multiple choice game where the user can pick a word and choose the write meaning from several definitions. This would be much better than just picking the word and trying to guess the definition and then checking to see if you got it right. All the users of this app thought it was better than any other SAT study app available on the market.

So if you are a high school student getting ready to take the SAT test and you don’t have a good vocabulary, then this is the app to buy in order to prepare you for the real thing.

Create Industrial-Strength Passwords with Secret Word

Ever worry about using SPOCKNCC1701 as the password for your bank accounts, blogs, and email?

Now you can replace your tired old hackable passwords with something really secure like, !;@#pkL$, Qk$f!-Be#.!iq, or even FVGS:cwsjY$:%X with this elegant and simple app from Bay Area developer Alex Roberts.



Secret Word does one thing and does it well: generates passwords. Just tap the “recirculate” icon and a new one appears. Choose any length from four to twelve characters, include symbols, or limit your passwords to letters and numbers. You can tap to copy and save the passwords in Notes or use the Mail icon to send them via your default e-mail account. That's it! So simple, a drunken chicken could use it while scuba diving and the gradient carbon fiber mesh background looks great on your screen.

Pros: Easy, Effective, Useful, and Beautiful

Cons: None found

I Am T-Pain-One Hit Wonder!

Smule's new app, I Am T-Pain, has become a complete success. Rising into the top 10 within it's first day of release, this app is a load of fun. The app auto tunes your voice while you sing to T-Pain's most popular songs. It makes anybody sound like they are T-Pain.

The app includes five songs with lyrics and beats that are already preset and you can buy more songs with the new 3.0 in-app purchase feature. Or you can go freestyle and sing without music and lyrics. I Am t-Pain is created for iPhone users or iPod touch users with microphones.

Video:



Update:

I am T-Pain has been updated to work with iPod touch 2nd and 3rd Generation but not with iPod touch 1st Generation. In their app description, Smule says for

iPod touch users: make sure your headphones are plugged in before you launch the App.

Appbox Pro

Appbox Pro
Rating: 5/5

Appbox pro is unlike any other app available on the app store. First of all, it combines 18 apps into 3.1 MB. These apps include battery life, clinometer, currency, a dashboard, date calculator, days until, a flashlight, holidays, a loan calculator, a p calculator, random number, price grab, a ruler, sale price, a tip calculator, a translator, a unit converter with an amazing 357 units, and last but not least, web app links. There are bound to be even more apps added through updates. Although it may seem complicated, it is not. It's very easy to figure out. The layout is very appealing to the eye, and is amazing at only $0.99.



The app even includes a mini game, Collapse, which wasn’t mentioned on the app store. The clinometer is very detailed, and is a bargain considering that real ones fetch prices of up to $35. I especially like that it shows you the amount of space you have on your iPod touch or iPhone and converts it into an easy to read graph. The web app links pretty much just direct you to the web apps through Safari. The P calculator is for women only and predicts the probability of pregnancy and ovulation. Random number does what the name suggests. It picks a random number within your boundaries. The translator has an amazing selection of languages and is better than some translation apps I have purchased from the app store for five times the price. The currency app will convert your currency to eleven other currencies. It will even update the rates for you, so you know the approximate conversion. The dashboard pretty much gives you a review of what is going on. It provides you with battery info, storage info, upcoming holidays, and the current currency rate, which is frequently updated. The date calculator will tell you everything that you possibly need to know about dates, and the days until app will countdown to a date you picked. The flashlight can vary in color through the whole color spectrum and the brightness can be lowered or raised. The holiday app will tell you upcoming holidays in 8 countries. Clearly this app is extremely under priced.

This app should cost at least $10 dollars, because there are more than 18 mini apps within the whole app. I could find no faults with this app and highly recommend it.