Macgasm

Let’s face facts, people. Most, if not all of us are striking back at our evil corporate overlords by engaging in what the kids these days are calling Social Media. The Facebooks and the Twitters are doing everything they possibly can to erode employee productivity and send the bottom line straight into the toilet, and your Uncle Scott is here to help push that process along as much as possible by introducing you to the best damn Facetwit application the iPhone has going for it: Seesmic.

I’ve been a long-time Twitter and Facebook citizen, and though there are plenty of good Twitter clients and a solid Facebook app on the iPhone, I’m all about the convergence. I challenge anyone to come into my kitchen and find a device with only one use — no rice-cookers or potato-mashers for this guy.

Multipurpose is all the rage these days, and my iOS app choices usually reflect that as well. I’m often “that guy” who posts the same nugget of brain candy as both a Tweet and a Facebook Status update, so having a place to do both at once is super handy.

Seesmic allows you to register multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts, and lets you easily switch between them, posting content to all or any of them in one fell swoop. A 4-panes “desktop” view shows you all of your accounts at a glance, and you can also scroll between accounts simply by swiping right and left. Location Services, TwitPic/TwitVid support, URL shortening — it’s all there under the hood.

All of the other Twitter functionality you’d expect is right there, and the Facebook side is no slouch either. Quickly scroll through your news feed, post comments on things, and Like-button the crap out of them. The only thing missing is the ability to dive into people’s FB profiles, but for that the actual Facebook app is only a tap away.

Seesmic is in no way a “new” application. It’s been around for quite some time, which might beg the question as to why it deserves a review. Over the last few weeks I’ve seen a growing number of people on Twitter asking for recommendations for good iPhone clients, as some of the other major players either aren’t providing certain functionality or are having some pretty severe stability problems. Since Facebook, by population, is something like the world’s 4th biggest country or whatever, it stands to reason that there are a LOT of you who are in the same boat. Seesmic’s desktop and web-based clients are well-known, but their iPhone app seems to have flown under the radar a bit, so I’m just trying to preach the gospel a bitsy.

Oh, and the best feature? Seesmic sells for the low, low price of precisely no money. I hereby COMMAND you to go get it.

(Author’s side note: this entire review was crafted on a train somewhere between Göteborg and Stockholm, Sweden, using nothing but an iPad. But yeah, the iPad is only for consumption, not creation. Right.)

I have been on SUCH a retro gaming kick on my iPhone for the last few months. Between Karate Champ, Phoenix Wright, and Final Fantasy I’ve been able to reclaim most of my childhood (if not the legions of quarters I wasted during those years). However, I’m always up and ready for yet another vacation to Olde Towne Nostalgia™, and I recently discovered the bus that takes me right down Main Street.

It’s possible that some of you reading this weren’t alive during the early 1980s. Others of you may have known the touch of a woman during those years. For the rest of us, Dragon’s Lair hitting the arcades in 1983 heralded a heretofore unknown level of hype, as it was the first arcade game with graphic quality that looked just like it had popped right off of your TV screen during Saturday morning cartoons. The secret: LaserDisc. Essentially, the cabinet was a giant laserdisc player, and the controllers were a remote control. Pressing a direction on the joystick or hitting the Sword button would skip the laserdisc to a corresponding “chapter,” and the result of your action would be shown on-screen. (Dragon’s Lair also made its way into your living room a few years later. Any one of the roughly 13 people who owned home LaserDisc players were able to purchase the home version.)

Essentially, the game was a matter of pattern recognition. Move the joystick or hit Sword at the right time, and your hero Dirk the Daring (on his noble quest to free his girlfriend Generic Blonde Princess #982641 from the clutches of the evil – wait for it – Dragon from its Lair) would act correspondingly to survive and move on. Move the joystick or hit Sword a fraction of a second too soon or too late and you would watch Dirk the Daring die in any number of hilarious ways. Do this three times and prepare to feed the beast another quarter.

Suffice it to say, this game looked absolutely gorgeous, and was ridiculously, stupidly difficult. If a video game has ever been produced before or since that is any less forgiving, I’d hate to be made to try it.

So, this begs the question: why in the name of all of Christendom would anyone pay for the privilege of submitting themselves to this monstrosity nearly 30 years after it’s initial release? Well, there are a few very compelling reasons to answer that:

• It’s friggin’ cheap. At 99 cents, you can’t do much better than that.
• You don’t often find such a macabre sense of humour anymore. The vast myriad of ways that Dirk can meet his doom is alone worth the price of admission.
• The developers wisely added the one feature that the original arcade game makers never could have: infinite lives.

So, with that nasty three-strikes-and-you’re-out issue safely out of the way, Dragon’s Lair actually becomes hella awesome, if not still a bit infuriatingly maddening in some sections. The game pretty much plays out as a series of short episodes. Each “room” in the Lair presents Dirk with another encounter to maneuver and sword his way out of. Survive a room and move on to the next. Die, and repeat the room again until you succeed. Each room only takes a half-dozen moves or so to pass, so they’re quick.

However, the developers, in an attempt to destroy the mind of everyone who plays this game, added two extra dollops of pure evil challenges:

• The rooms in the Lair can appear in random order, sometimes even twice or more in the same game, and
• Each room could appear normally or, maddeningly, as an exact left/right mirror of itself.

A skilled Pac-Man player could just memorize the patterns the Ghosts took in each stage and win the game. In Dragon’s Lair, memorizing a series of moves became several orders of magnitude more difficult because you don’t know which stage is coming next, and you don’t know if the move order was going to be Right Up Right Up Left Down Sword Up Right or Left Up Left Up Right Down Sword Up Left until after each stage had started.

All that being said, the gameplay translates extremely well to the iPhone’s touch screen. Instead of a joystick and button control board, you have arrows and a Sword button on-screen to tap on at the right time. Helpfully, the controls light up (and a tone is played) when they need to be pressed.

Up for an extra dose of sado-masochism? Both of the helper options (tone and lighted controls) can be disabled. Even crazier than that? You can disable infinite lives. Beyond this place, the angels themselves fear to tread.

In the end, I’ve spent a good few hours playing this game, and I have yet to rescue Generic Blonde Princess #982641, though she makes a few cameo appearances in select rooms (always screaming “SAVE ME!” as a green, scaly claw hauls her off-screen). Was it worth my 99 cents? Absolutely. Has it nearly caused me to smash my iPhone off the floor in frustration? Not yet. Yet.

Should you buy it? Yes.

na na na na na na na na LEADER na na na na na na na na LEADER ('leaderboard' was the correct answer)

When I was in kindergarten, I couldn’t draw or color. Staying inside the lines was just not in my DNA. Not remotely. It’s like I didn’t even know the lines were there. I’d be handed a picture to color, and would take a crayon and just start scribbling anywhere. Sometimes, but not always, on the paper I’d been given. According to my teacher (who also happens to be my mom, so this comes from a reliable source), one day she sat me at a table with other children who COULD draw well, thinking that maybe some of their ability would influence me.

When I saw how much better their coloring was, I started to cry. True story.

Even though I work in the advertising industry where graphic design rules the order of the day, clearly I’m not an artist. Thank the baby Jebus that an app like Charadium exists, to level the playing field and bring everyone else down to my level. As long as you’ve got the most basic, rudimentary motor skills and a decent spelling ability at your disposal, you’ve got everything you need.

If, like most other iOS device owners, you’ve kicked around playing Scrabble in Words With Friends, you’ll feel right at home in this online Pictionary clone. Launch app, create account, tap ‘Quick Play’, and you’re automatically dropped into a game with 4 or 5 other people for some hot finger-on-screen drawing and guessing action.

Forget fine-point pencils and cross-hatch shading techniques. This is doing to to the world of fine art the same thing that Leonidas and the Spartans did to the Persians in 300. Drawing with your fingertip is far from a precise art, but that’s ok. When your turn to draw comes up, just start scribbling. The game gives you a bit of time to think about what you’re going to draw before you start, so you can put a bit of thought into it. As time winds down, you generally see people just start scrawling the word itself across the screen in order for someone to score something in a given turn.

Scoring is simple: first person to guess the word gets points. The faster a word is guessed, the more points are doled out. Play until a game ends or you feel like stopping. You can also add friends to a buddy list and start a game with people you know, but where’s the fun in that? Clearly adding me (‘humantorch’) to your buddy list would be a horrible, horrible idea and you should never do that EVER.

I see you've started spelling the word 'Knockers,' sir. Truly, you are this generation's Shakespeare.

The only real downside I found while playing this is John Gabriel’s Greater Internet F***wad Theory, which states that a Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total F***wad, and sadly this is (rarely) the case. Since there’s no way to actually know who the strangers you’re playing with are, you will occasionally get some jackass who just starts drawing wangs (or less rudely, just starts spelling the word out right at the start) when it’s his turn. There is a “report abuse” function, but this is probably of little use since said jackass can create a new account with a new username in about 30 seconds. Granted, I only saw this twice, so I don’t think it’s all that common, but just so you know, it’s out there.

That one issue aside, this is good fun. I’ve kinda burned out on Words With Friends, so this has been a nice change of pace.

Charadium for the iPhone is available on the App Store free of charge for the basic version or for $2.99 for the Pro version. An iPad version is also available for $4.99.

I’m sure if I sat down and counted up just how many quarters I pumped into arcade games as a kid, I’d be depressed at the things I could be buying now if I’d only kept that money instead. Like, we’re talking on the level of multiple yachts. A yacht for every day of the week. “Hey honey,” I’d say to my wife, “which yacht should we take to the club this weekend?” We’d ride around in our yachts and laugh and laugh and sip expensive wine out of crystal glasses with our other rich friends and…

… what was I saying?

EAT HIGH KICK TO THE FACE, BEEYOTCH.

Right. Arcades. Man, when I was in junior high I loved me the hell out of those places, and the memories of playing some of those old-school games has always stuck with me. For this reason, I always love it when some development company gets a bout of nostalgia and resurrects an old game for one of the newfangled devices the kids are playing with these days, and it was just yesterday that I randomly stumbled across Karate Champ in the App Store. This is no “modernized reboot.” This is basically the original ROM from the arcade cabinet shoehorned into a touchscreen interface, complete with all of the quirks and charm of the original. Trust me, I played this game enough to recognize that digitzed voice saying “BEGIN,” “HALF POINT,” and “FULL POINT” to have it haunt my dreams.

That's right, baby. You'll be all mine as soon as I lay a sound drubbing upon my evil doppleganger over there.

Karate Champ. Probably the first martial-arts video game to pit Player One against Player Two, two identically-skilled twins, one in red and one in white. Think of them as the original Ryu and Ken. Gameplay is very simple. There are no “energy levels” to deplete. Strike your opponent first to either earn a half or full point, and score 2 points to win a round. Win two rounds and move on to the next stage. Lose just one single round at any time and watch the game over screen. The prize for winning a stage? A woman. This game was made in the 80′s, kids, times were different back then. Men were men and women were prizes.

Just STAY DOWN unless you want to kiss my heel again.

Where most video games employ the use of buttons in their interface controls, Karate Champ controls consist of two joysticks. The original arcade cabinet had four joysticks on the control board, two for each player. A rough guide is that the left stick controls your movement and the right stick controls your attack direction (up to kick high, down to leg sweep, etc.), but of course different combos would result in different advanced moves (up and right at the same time to jump kick, right and left and the same time for a spinning reverse kick, etc.). With 16 different directional combos, there always seemed to be more moves and hidden tricks to discover. Of course, pulling off a victory with more advanced moves resulted in scoring more points.

Next time you WILL be mine, pixellated bikini lady!

Obviously, the iPhone is sadly lacking in joysticks and wood-grain paneling, but a touch-screen orientation perfectly suited to laying two thumbs in the corners of your screen rides to the rescue. Left thumb controls the left stick, right thumb controls the right. After a couple of games to get used to how sensitive the controls are (no wasted quarters! yay!) and I was off to the races. Pretty quickly I was beating Red like a rented mule for the first few levels, but just like when I was younger, about the time you get to the stage that takes place on a log across a canyon, Red starts to get a little more aggressive and defensively sound. A couple of stages after that he seemingly gets possessed by the spirit of Chuck Norris, blocking everything I can throw at him before roundhouse kicking my tits off. I will defeat him, though. She will be mine!

Of course I’m biased because of my childhood memories, but so far Karate Champ is turning out to be the best iPhone app I’ve maybe ever purchased. At 99 cents, you really can’t go wrong!

I LOVE YOU I AM MANLY AND VICTORIOUS

Thanks to the combined Voltron-esque power of a bad back and some loopiness-inducing pain pills, your Uncle Scott wasn’t able to throw down a review last week. Have no fear though kids, because to make up for it, this week we’ve got a double heaping of iPhone photography apps to run through their paces. It’s because we care! Also, many photos of my cats are included. For this, I am not sorry.

Photonasis

Yay! Effects!

If you’ve ever used Adobe® Photoshop®, Photonasis is, essentially, Photoshop’s Filters dropdown menu. You select a photo from your library (or take one directly from within the app), and choose one of 34 effects to apply to it.

That’s it. That’s the entire app. There are no options, no sliders to set just how much blur or distortion or whatever to apply to your picture. You pick a filter and save. As far as I could tell, the only way to apply multiple filters to an image is to save and then open the filtered photo as a new image and go from there. Most of the effects are gimmicky at best (the “Bathroom Door” filter as shown in the bottom right corner above, for example), but a couple of them could be useful for slightly touching-up an image that’s a bit too dark or sharp, or converting an image to Sepia tone or Black & White. However, if that’s what you want this app to do, you’re better off using something like Adobe’s Photoshop Mobile, which allows you a measure of control over your filters instead of a simple on/off toggle.

Polarize

Now THIS one, man oh man, I’ve had some fun with. Essentially, Polarize simply takes your photos, converts them into looking like they came from an old Polaroid camera, and then allows you to scrawl a title on them with a magic marker. Seems pretty simple, but sometimes that’s where the best ideas lie! Like Photonasis, you don’t get any control over how the image is affected, but that’s not really the point of this app anyways.

Author's note: the top of my head is 3 inches higher than the top of the sign ABOVE the door. THAT'S how tiny it is. Also, my cats are nowhere near this door. Unfortunately.

Choose your photo. Choose your text. Save. Easy. I’ve seen a number of blogs using this effect lately and wasn’t sure which program they were using to pull it off, but there you go.

Both Photonasis and Polarizer are free of charge in the App Store, so go nuts. Let your inner Ansel Adams go hog wild!

I grew up in Edmonton, Canada, home of the West Edmonton Mall, which was at one point the largest mall in the world. Among its many attractions is the World Waterpark, the largest indoor waterslide/wavepool park in the world. I can’t count the number of summer days I spent inside that place, splashing around in the Blue Thunder wave pool, riding the Skyscreamer (a nearly straight vertical drop about 5 seconds long), and screaming my way down the Howler (a long, twisty slide with about 75% of it in complete darkness). Good times.

As the days are getting warmer and longer, I find my thoughts while sitting at a desk in an office building drifting more and more towards longing for the days when my biggest decision was which slide to go on next.

Slippery when wet

Though it doesn’t involve having to use a gang shower or putting on a swimsuit, Waterslide Extreme on the iPhone is as close as you can get to a real waterslide experience without having to worry about tripping the water sensors inside your electronics. I don’t know which city has built a towering series of glass waterslides above it’s skyscrapers, but holy CRAP do I ever want to move there.

Gameplay is simple: tilt your iPhone left and right to steer, tilt it back towards you to slow down. Try to collect gems on your way down, avoid obstacles, and for God’s sake don’t let yourself fly over the edge on a corner. That’s a LONG way down.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

I’m also not entirely sure just how many safety regulations this waterslide violates. Aside from the fact that you’re starting out a good hundred stories above the ground with no apparent safety equipment, some of the slides – oh, there’s just no way to class this up – appear to be infested with crabs.

I'll admit it. I giggled.

I generally don’t expect a high degree of realism in video games, so I’m willing to suspend my disbelief here. In the end, this is a free app that provided me with more than a few minutes of entertainment value, and it even politely asks me on launch if I want to listen to its included music or tunes from my own library. Fun and polite. Gender equality abounds as well, as you get to choose a male or female racer at the beginning.

Think you’ve got what it takes to master all 9 slides? Give Waterslide Extreme a whirl. There are worse ways to spend time sitting indoors waiting for quitting time!

Holy crap! Holy crap! One of the greatest cult hits on the Nintendo DS is now available for the iPhone! I know! GLEE!

YEAH! OBJECTION!

If you’ve never played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney before, the premise is simple. You’re a young, hotshot defence lawyer just getting into the biz, and you have to work your mojo in a series of increasingly-difficult cases to prove your worth to your highly inappropriately-dressed, way-too-young-to-be-a-successful-lawyer boss.

HELLLOOOOOO CHIEF!

Essentially a point-and-click puzzle adventure, you are dropped into a courtroom, presented with testimonies, arguments, and evidence. Then you are expected to spot discrepancies in stories in order to prove who’s really to blame. The top half of your screen is where you can see the character in focus, and the bottom half is where you interact with Q&As, court documents, evidence, etc. You can scroll through dossiers of key characters, lists of evidence entered into court, and are then given opportunities to either press a witness during cross-examination if you suspect anything, or present evidence to catch them in the middle of a bald-faced lie. In typical Japanimation fashion, character facial expressions are grossly over-exaggerated to the point of hilarity, such as when the case appears to be not going so well in your favor.

Also, apparently, dealing with a severe case of constipation. Or a nasty hangover. Not sure which.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney consists of 5 separate “stories” to play through, but only one is initially available to you at the start. Successfully defending your friend “Butz” (no, not making that up) from a murder charge unlocks the next story in Phoenix’s adventure, and so on and so forth. In later stories, you also get the chance to play investigator, visiting crime scenes and so forth – you know, the kind of leg work that lawyers on TV do all the time and that real-life attorneys NEVER do. Do not expect a single ounce of realism here, but definitely expect to give pause and more than the occasional giggle at the storytelling and interaction between characters. It gets downright silly (in a good way) at points.

Priced at $4.99, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is an absolute steal. When it was available on the DS, it was often priced at $40 or more, and it was ridiculously hard to get your hands on a copy. Is the game itself difficult? Not particularly. Are the graphics and sound effects fitting for such a next-gen device like the iPhone 3GS? Since it’s been pretty much lifted straight from the DS version which was itself released in 2005, not so much, no. Does this make it in any way any less fun? Not on your life. You’ll quickly find yourself relishing your next chance to stand up, point your finger at an oath-breaking witness, and shout out Phoenix’s catch-phrase: “OBJECTION!”

You bet your sweet ass I've got a point, Santa Claus.

And, well, if you still need a bit more convincing, turn up your speakers and click here. Maybe check that your volume isn’t obscenely loud first, though. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I saw Iron Man 2 last weekend, and I loved every single second of it. That movie is constructed of Pure, Fortified Awesome™ from start to finish (and for the love of Dog, if you haven’t seen it yet, STAY TO THE END OF THE CREDITS). However, the age of mass commercialization we live in means that nothing remotely good is allowed to exist in mainstream media without a metric assload of promo tie-ins designed to milk every last cent of your allowance away in order to line the pockets of some old rich white dude living in Nashville or wherever.

So of course, one of the first things I did after walking out of the movie was separate myself from 49 of my hard-earned Swedish Kronor and downloaded the official Iron Man 2 game from the app store.

I have a few questions for the developers of this game. Namely, couldn’t you even TRY to find a voice actor that sounds REMOTELY like Robert Downey Jr.? The dialogue in this game is horrible: corny 1-liners that sound like they’re read by people from the Keanu Reeves school of acting do not good voice-acting make.

That aside, the actual gameplay left me feeling pretty sour as well. The touch screen controls are awkward at best: you use your left thumb to control an on-screen joystick, your right thumb to activate various weapons and powers, and the… third hand the developers apparently assume you’ve been blessed with (?) to drag an index finger across the screen to change your camera angle. This convoluted control structure makes it impossible to move, shoot, and look around at the same time – a necessity when you’re surrounded by half a dozen robots all shooting at you from different directions. Good thing your energy bar completely replenishes itself after every skirmish. Funny, I don’t remember Iron Man having that ability in the movie. I also don’t remember his only hand-to-hand combat move being doing the splits in mid-air while double-axe-handle-smashing his opponent’s head in, but that’s a staple move in this game.

Iron Man, feeling the effects of yet another laser blast to the torso, courtesy of yet another goddamn offscreen enemy.

And, just when I thought I was done with random running around getting shot at by invisible flying robots, I was given a quest! Three bombs were set in buildings, and I had 3 minutes to find and defuse them! Hot damn, something to do! So, off I went in search of the bombs. I found the first one, only to be greeted with:

Iron Man strikes me as the kind of guy who solves puzzles with missiles. Not sliding tiles.

A puzzle. In which alternate Marvel universe does Iron Man defuse bombs by assembling an Arc Reactor in sliding-tile-puzzle format? Did The Riddler suddenly cross over from DC and bring all of his crappy plotlines with him? Lame. Anyways, I “defused” the first two bombs and went in search of the third. Time was winding down, but I finally found it… or did I?

Was this glowy red chainlink fence in the movie?

A red, glowing, 10 foot high chain link fence stood in my way. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way around it, time ran down, I failed the quest, was told to start again, and deleted the game.

Aside from the fact that I don’t exactly remember this scene from the movie, I’d like to remind the people who wrote this game that Iron Man can FLY. A 10-foot high fence would halt his progress for precisely 2 seconds while he decided whether to fly over it or melt it into oblivion.

It’s cheap, shoddy, shameless game-lengthening techniques like this that make me never want to play your game again. However, the team that built this already succeeded as far as I was concerned: they already had my money. It’s made even more disappointing by how much I loved the movie. I wanted to love this game, but unfortunately the only real connection I can see between it and the movie is the music.

Final verdict: Pass. Save your money. Watch this instead.