Best Iphone Apps Review

soundTable for iPad Review is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website

A few weeks ago, I wrote a review extolling the virtues of iSequence, a sophisticated new iPad app that allows musicians to construct full-scale songs from their touch screens. That app could be overwhelming to a first time user or a novice musician, but now soundTable fills that void by providing a simplified interface and learning curve for beginners wanting to create interesting electronic sequences.

As its name implies, all controls in soundTable are manipulated from one master screen. You can easily search sound banks to find the beats, synths and other sounds you want, then drag them to the middle of the screen – the “table” – where their volume, speed and direction can be manipulated using circular turntables that surround each individual sound. As you drag sounds to the main table, they “attach” themselves visually to a master control at the bottom of the screen. These attachment lines are actually representations of sound waves and they can be manipulated by attaching additional effects to them. Ultimately, you’ll likely have a half dozen or more mini turntables on screen at once, so it can get a little confusing and often difficult to fully control.

To be fair, though, the interface in soundTable is interesting and unique and easy enough to begin with. It would help if the developers included a comprehensive help file with the app, but you will have to settle for the info button, which merely describes what each set of buttons represents. That’s certainly enough to get you going, but as users continue playing with the app they are probably going to want more and better explanations.

The sounds available in soundTable are pretty standard, but fortunately the developers have included many, many more available for download free. You can sample each sound and decide if you want it, so you don’t have to litter your iPad’s precious drive space with unwanted sounds. Hopefully there will be additional sound packs released as the app reaches maturity. At only $0.99 for the app, I wouldn’t mind paying extra for more sounds.

Graphically, soundTable really impresses. With a variety of virtual turntables and sound waves going at one time, the interface of the app looks something like an art piece. It remains to be seen (and heard) what the most ambitious of users will be able to sonically do within the confines of the iPad’s screen.

At this point, soundTable is more of a toy than apps such as iSequence, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It represents a good first step for those just now venturing into the ambient unknown.

[ soundTable for iPad Review is a post from 148Apps ]

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StopMotion Recorder Review is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website

The art of stop motion is a filming technique that’s been around since the late 1800s and popularized in the swinging 1960s. It’s created by photographing every movement a character or prop makes, then stitching them together in rapid succession. Although, it’s quite complicated and therefore mainly left to the pros. Now, you can make your own stop motion film easily with just your iPhone and StopMotion Recorder.

The app is basic; just point and click. When you first go into the app, the camera will be deployed. The principal is easy – pose your characters and touch the screen to take pictures. A nifty feature to make sure you line up each shot from one to another is a shadow of the previous picture (aka onion skin), so there will be no unwanted differences once you put the frames together.

Once finished, you get a chance to review all the frames, cut ones you don’t want and set the speed of your movie (how many frames you want to play per second) and that’s it! A stop motion movie in minutes. The list of your finished movies can be accessed any time from within the app.

There are lots of options to chose from for sharing for creations; send to Twitter using YFrog or TwitVid, mail it or upload it to Flickr or YouTube. Interestingly, if you want it in your camera roll, you have to export it from the app first. It would be much better if the movie was automatically added to the camera roll, like many other picture and movie apps do. There is a settings menu, but nothing there is too complicated and instead just invites you to try different effects on your pictures.

The photo quality of the movie is also only as good as the iPhone camera. Don’t expect to have a very high quality movie unless you are in natural sunlight. Though the app does try to focus each frame as you take it, giving each frame a much crisper look. Due to the quality restrictions of the camera, StopMotion Recorder might be a little too irritating for those without patience or a steady hand.

One very strange detail is the lack of auto-rotation when taking the photos. If you hold the iphone on its side to make the most of the screen, then you might end up with an upside down or sideways movie that needs editing once uploaded to a computer, defeating the object slightly.

Anyone looking for a bit of fun should give StopMotion Recorder a go, as it’s bound to bring hours of entertainment to an individual or a group. The creativity is pretty much boundless, only tampered slightly by the lack of rotation and camera quality. For just $0.99, this is an absolute steal.

[ StopMotion Recorder Review is a post from 148Apps ]

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DungeonCore Review is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website

Dungeon Core is a “specialty” game that really caters to a certain type of person. This person must have boundless patience, absolutely zero temper, and a willingness to plug on even though there is absolutely no hope.

I hate this.

I’ll try to get you into the right mindset here. Imagine Dungeon Core as two 8 year old children trying to make up a game. One child is in charge of the hero and the other child is the “nuh uh” kid (otherwise known as the cruel designers at Gaewool).

So the hero kills a bunch of bad guys, upgrades his hero with HP raising shields and speed controlling boots, hurtling downwards to fight the boss and the “nuh uh” kid says, “Nuh uh, I’ll just have a random fireball shoot from nowhere to kill you!”

“Well then I’ll dodge the fireball and keep going.” Nuh Uh kid puts a scowl on his face and says, “Nuh Uh, when you are trying to escape I’ll take up half the screen with a flying shark with man sized teeth. (actual game occurrence).

Nuh Uh kid is spiteful too, instead of giving you saves and checkpoints, he expects you to finish the entire game in one go. Get hit my some spikes that appeared from nowhere, or hit by a large flying shark… too bad, you’re dead. Start over. He also decided that your downward quest would be more fun if you can’t stop, instead you have to tilt your way in constant motion downward. Oh, and if you tilt your way beyond where the screen is, you’re dead.

Good luck!

The pain isn’t over yet, when you finally die you get to see a diagram of where you died in relation to how large the dungeon is. You can play for a good long while, get eaten by a screen sized shark, and still only be about 1/8th through the game. Ahhhhh, I hate this game, but I just can’t stop playing.

Here’s my recommendation. Buy DungeonCore, but not because you will like it, but because you’ll want to be a part of the shared misery. Buy it for the same reason that you bought Zelda 2 on the NES then wanted to throw your controller when you went off the “yellow brick road”.

[ DungeonCore Review is a post from 148Apps ]

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‘Cubed Rally Racer’ – New Lite Version and 99¢ Sale is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website

Back in May, Jared Bailey from NoCanWin.com released Cubed Rally Racer [99¢] onto the App Store. Inspired by NES-era isometric racers, Cubed Rally Racer was dubbed “RC Pro-Am meets Canabalt”, and fits that tagline rather well. It put you in control of a rally car tasked with racing through randomly generated levels, all the while avoiding cows, gophers, and other silly obstacles on your way to the finish line. We really liked the game in our review, but noted that the controls can be hard to get used to and the overall difficulty of the game is rather high.

Because of those reasons, many gamers may have been on the fence over purchasing the game. Those fence-sitters should be happy to know then that a lite version of Cubed Rally Racer has just been made available. The full version features tracks made up of sections, with a maximum number of 99 sections in a track. Cubed Rally Racer Lite [Free] features up to 3 sections of track to race on, and a selection of the different unlockable track obstacles from the full version. It's definitely enough to give you an idea of whether or not you'll enjoy the full version, and there is an option to upgrade to the full right from within the game after practically every race.

What you don't get in the lite is any kind of OpenFeint integration, which is a huge part of Cubed Rally Racer as you can send challenges to friends and and compete on several different leaderboards. Also missing in the lite is the endless Pasture mode which acts as a more casual practice track, and Redline mode which is pretty much the opposite and has a red line chasing you down an endless course while you race, forcing you to keep up a brisk pace. These two modes have been added in an update since we reviewed the game, and players in our forums are absolutely loving them. In addition, the full version has many more types of track sections and obstacles available.

If you have never been able to pull the trigger on purchasing Cubed Rally Racer, definitely give this new lite version a try. It's the type of game that doesn't appeal to everybody, but to those who take kindly to it it's a real gaming treat. As an added incentive, the full game is seeing it's first ever price drop, down to 99¢ from $1.99. If you like what you see in the lite version, now is a great chance to jump on the full version of Cubed Rally Racer during this limited time sale.

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Twang Review is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website

Twang puts the power of an acoustic guitar into the palm of your hand. It sounds fairly consistent with what a guitar would sound like, allows for multiple tuning options, and has a plethora of key combinations to play plenty of different songs. Even with all this though, it doesn’t get much past novelty status.

Twang is played using the chords and strings directly on the app. Outside of a few settings, and some tune change options, that’s all there is to this app. It is, simply, a guitar app. No tutorial videos, no how to, no recording options, just the guitar itself. The iTunes page points you to some YouTube postings that help teach you songs and walk you through using the app, but it’s not really helpful to you if you’re trying to learn to play without a computer sitting in front of you to watch the app.

I would have liked to see some pre-recorded stuff to play along with, almost similar to ArtStudio’s approach to teaching you how to draw. Step one, this chord combination and these strings, step two… etc. Those with guitar playing knowledge will find Twang to be a good fit, and you can see plenty of people playing on YouTube. Don’t expect it to be the way you learn how to play guitar however.

[ Twang Review is a post from 148Apps ]

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‘Babylonian Twins’ 75% Off, Marking Amiga’s 25th Anniversary is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website

As someone who's been a gamer for 30 years now, I must say things have come a long way from those distant, humble beginnings.

A few crude black and white blocks turned into somewhat less crude color blocks, which became much nicer looking high-palette pixel art and — flash forward 20 years — we've got expansive 3D worlds rendered sharper than a high-definition feature film. Technology marches ever on and, along the way, has brought gamers a vast array of computers and consoles, each a step forward from the one that came before. And the largest single step forward along these lines that ever took place was unquestionably the arrival of the Amiga from Commodore.

At half the price of the Macintosh and a quarter the price of IBM's meatiest desktop, the Amiga, which PC World called the seventh greatest computer of all time, delivered vastly more capable hardware than either, along with a fully preemptive multitasking UNIX-like operating system. Nothing of the likes of its graphics and audio capabilities had ever been seen before. It excelled in gaming and this new sort of thing called "multimedia" that, at the time, people really didn't know what to make of. It really was 10 years before its time.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Amiga and a number of tech sites are taking the opportunity to pay tribute to this infulential platform with retrospectives and historical pieces. And, we're happy to report that Amiga and iPhone developer Rabah Shihab is honoring the occasion by dropping the price of Babylonian Twins for the iPhone [App Store] by 75% this weekend.

We took a close look at this reimagining of his 17-year old Amiga title back in April and found it to be one of the very best iPhone games out there (we gave it 4.5 stars). An iPad version is also available [App Store].

Babylonian Twins is s a puzzle-platformer with two-character tag-team type play. You control brothers Nasir and Blasir in order to solve each levels. Each character has some special abilities, but only one can be active at once. Switching between the two is as simple as tapping on a button — leaving the unplayed character as a statue. You'll find you need to tag team to make your way past puzzles and obstacles, and even use the other character as a springboard to jump higher. Blasir can jump higher, and dash into walls, while Nasir spin to break through weakened floors. The game is a collaborative effort between the two characters.

The game has been entirely revamped since the original Amiga version and includes all new graphics and audio.

And, while Babylonian Twins is a truly excellent title, it's not the only quality Amiga conversion in the App store. Not by a long shot. And, thanks to Manomio, among others, we're in for a lot more Amiga game goodness in the App Store later this year.

Related Amiga links:

• Amiga: 25 Years Later
• Shadow of the 16-bit Beast: an Amiga gaming retrospective
• Ars Technica's A History of the Amiga (parts 1 – 6)
• Amiga.org community

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Train Conductor 2 Review is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website

Built upon the much of the same gameplay that the original offered, Train Conductor 2 takes the train guiding/line drawing experience to the USA.

The basic premise of Train Conductor 2 is that you must get a bunch of trains safely from one side of the screen to the other. Trains will be coming from the left side of the screen and the right, and it is up to you to draw in the track that will send them to their correct destination. With multiple trains taking off at once though, it becomes very difficult to maneuver them all so they won’t collide.

Unlike other line-drawing games, Train Conductor allows you to stop the train with a simple tap, freeing some track space up for another incoming train. The pace doesn’t stop though when you decide the train should stop, as another train could just come up and hit the back end of the stopped one.

Each level has its own set of rules and guidelines, such as the ghost level in Nashville that allows trains to pass through each other and the Grand Canyon level that cuts your reaction time by eliminating the middle of the track. If you don’t route a train, it won’t just go to the wrong place (which deducts points), it will fall to its doom and you will lose.

The problem with Train Conductor 2 is that even though each level is fun in its own right, none are as epic as the levels in Flight Control, the best known game in the genre. There is nothing wrong with this, but because each level has a smaller scope, the game needs more levels to compensate. With only 5 levels to play, there just isn’t enough variety to keep me playing the game for too long.

If you are looking for a new line-drawing game to conquer, or just like to rack up high scores (although there is no global leader board, just Facebook Connect… sad), Train Conductor 2 will keep you entertained for some time. The existing levels do get old though, so hopefully more levels will be added on in the near future.

[ Train Conductor 2 Review is a post from 148Apps ]

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Acme Lists Review is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website

I’ve reviewed quite a few list apps since starting with 148Apps. It hasn’t been on purpose, by any means. I don’t even make many lists. I just seem to gravitate towards these kinds of apps for some reason. I’ve made the statement before in reviews that if I would be using a list app, it would be this app, or that app. Yet, here I am, not using a list app at all.

That was before I realized the greatness of Acme Lists. The greatness I speak of isn’t in the bells and whistles, the time stamping and organizing of data, the categorizing of lists by importance, type, smell, sound… etc that other similar apps flaunt as their selling point. The greatness of Acme Lists is in the simplistic design and ease of use, the quick input of lists and the quick deletion of finished objectives. No tracking, no breakdowns, no graphs, just pure list making bliss.

The interface for Acme lists is fairly straight forward. Three tabs along the bottom of the screen separate out the list making, the settings page, and a comprehensive help page. With one click on the list page, a list can be viewed, added to, or deleted. With another click entire new lists can be created. Picked up those diapers at the corner store? You can delete the item all together or simply red line it through until the next shopping list, where it becomes necessary again.

Acme Lists isn’t without its own arsenal of bells and whistles though. A web server allows for remote editing of lists through a PC as long as both devices are on the same wi-fi connection. So your wife can upload your daily honeydo list before you ever wake up in the morning. Once you check the app, you’ll have a brand spanking new list of items to complete. Additionally, if your wife or husband has their own iDevice, the two devices can share lists over Bluetooth or wifi. So if you got the eggs and milk but he got the chicken and beef, your lists will be updated accordingly once connected.

The help page is extremely comprehensive, providing step by step instructions for each section, general information, and options to rate and share the app. If you’re looking for a simple yet useful list app, Acme Lists is a hard one to pass up. At $0.99, it’s a safe investment to see if it fits your needs. Now if you’ll excuse me, my shopping list needs completed.

[ Acme Lists Review is a post from 148Apps ]

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