If you are a comic book fan and a gamebook fan, then Appointment With F.E.A.R. is right up your alley. This classic gamebook written by Steve Jackson is Tin Man Games’ latest outing and adapts for the iOS the mechanics of a classic gamebook with an interesting new twist.
Appointment With F.E.A.R. parodies many familiar comic book heroes, villains and locales. As the main hero of Titan City, your job is to keep the city safe from an assorted lot of evildoers and thugs. Mainly, however, your mission is to prevent the meeting of F.E.A.R., a powerful organization of baddies, from taking place. Without much clues and only three days to do it, the challenge is to do the superhero stuff and be a detective at the same time. Oh, and as in typical super hero stories, your superhero identiy is a secret and you are a meek newspaper reporter by day (Clark Kent? Peter Parker?) with a mean boss.
It is 1914 and you are in the middle of World War I. You are an ordinary soldier, thrust into the power struggle between great European countries, to serve as fodder for protracted battles on the ground.
The App Store’s Editor’s Choice of the week Valiant Hearts: The Great War relives the confusion and nightmare of the war, told through the eyes of ordinary folks called upon to serve their country. Just as war, in its broadest sense, is just the game of the generals, it is ironic to see the game make out of a high stakes ‘game’ that cost lives.
Just wanted to give you guys a heads up that two excellent games are FREE this weekend. These are old favorites of mine and have stunning graphics and solid gameplay.
It’s been a while since indie developer Origin8 came out with a sequel to their award-winning tower defense (TD) series, Sentinel. However, Sentinel should be familiar to those who’ve been gaming on the iPhone and during the time when tower defense games were just starting to shine. With a long absence from the TD scene, does Sentinel 4 – Dark World measure up to the TD games that have come out since its hiatus?
Hanx Writer for iPad may seem like a quaint idea to most, but for those e who grew up with a manual typewriter long before Microsoft Word became a household name, Hanx Writer brings back memories and then some. The app, incidentally, was commissioned and endorsed by no less than award-winning actor Tom Hanks who is a typewriter fanatic.
Back then, typing was a challenging and frustrating experience. You needed to be extra careful when typing things – how soft or how hard you bang the keys means the difference between a smooth looking typewritten page and a page with out of place keys or smudged letters.
I can go on all day about the perils and terrors of typewriter ribbons gone threadbare and paper incorrectly inserted, but I’m not here to wax poetic about a bygone era, I’m here to talk about how Hanx Writer fares as a throwback app and as a notetaking/mini word processor.
The fun part about having a ‘pretend’ typewriter like Hanx Writer is that you get to enjoy the perks of typing manually without the corresponding headaches. The fun part of typing then was hearing the clickety clack of keys and watching words being hammered out on the page with a couple of quick strokes – the less than fun part was dealing with jammed keys, smudged letters and uneven typing. Nowadays, typing with a keyboard is a muted experience while a touchscreen computer is almost silent.
For a free app, you get to enjoy the experience of typing on a ‘pretend’ typewriter, complete with the clicking sound of the individual keys as you type and the ringing sound when you’ve reached the end of the line and have to move to the next. For the full-blown typing experience, you can even turn off the ‘modern’ way of correcting mistakes (read: backspace). However, it would also be nice to see keys a bit out of place just like what I was used to when I typed too hard. For select upgrades, you can try out new typewriter themes or styles or just get the entire pack for $5, which includes more ribbon colors, justify alignment, a title page with the option to put a picture, etc.
Hanx Writer makes typing on the touchscreen keyboard fun, but I’ve tried pairing the app with my trusty bluetooth keyboard and the experience has been seamless.
My only gripe with the app is that sharing options are limited. For now, you can only “share” or export your work in PDF, which you can of course open in other apps such as Goodreader and other PDF readers. It would be nice, however, to have other file saving options such as .txt or .rtf formats.
For a free app that you can straightaway enjoy without shelling out real money for in app purchases (IAP), Hanx Writer is a fun and engaging typing experience that is more than just a trip down memory lane. I can envision it to be my default writing app just to get those creative juices flowing. Check out the report below:
appSIZED rating: 5 out of 5
App: Hanx Writer for iPad
Link: Hanx Writer for iPad
Compatibility: iPad only
Price: FREE
Ver.: 1.0
Developer/Publisher: HitCents, Inc.
Ah, politics. Whether in the real world or in Royal Envoy’s fictional kingdom, it’s dirty. Playrix Games’ third and latest installment, Royal Envoy: Campaign for the Crown takes on politics as a mysterious person named Swindler (with a name like that, would you trust him?) seeks to capture the crown through election. Election … in a monarchy? Invoking some ancient law, Swindler has challenged the king to an election and is hell bent on sabotaging the King’s chances of winning.
This is where you step in, as his consultant/adviser/builder. Thanks to a highly effective misinformation campaign, most of the kingdom is in shambles due to charlatans tricking and deceiving people into destroying their home and introducing themselves as envoys of the King. Your mantra is rebuild and damage control in a wide variety of missions.
the zodiac clock
Having played Battleheart Legacy ($4.99/Universal for iPhone and iPad) for nearly a month now, let me share some of the tips and tricks I learned.
For a more extensive walkthrough, there are plenty of excellent and in-depth resources out there, such as in the Touch Arcade forum, but I hope my own experience will help you out as a starting player. (Check out the review/guide to Battleheart Legacy on appSIZED here)