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Available In: App Store |  |
Price: $1.99 |
I was never really good at Arkanoid. For some reason, versions of this game often are quick to be reproduced and released on portable gaming platforms. I’m sure I have a free version of this game on my iPhone somewhere. Fortunately for me, Ballsy (let’s get over the name fast, since I’ll be using it several times in this review, shall we?) offers a different type of game from Arkanoid that makes it more easily playable and potentially more enjoyable.
Overview
Ballsy is a simple breakout type game with the additional feature of allowing you to control the horizontal movement of the ball. Your goal is to collide your ball with the blocks and you can only break blocks with the current matching color. Special blocks can change your current color, but skull and crossbone blocks will ultimately lead to your doom. Options include changing the speed which will give you higher bonuses, tracking local and worldwide high scores, and the ability to resume saved games. [Read more...]
MadLibs is an application that is exactly that…
How fitting that my 10th review for the “School” is a math game? If you’ll recall, it was just over 3 weeks ago that I submitted 
I’ve never been much of a card game player. From time to time, I’ll break out the Bicycle decks for some Texas Hold’em at home with friends. On the computer, I’ll play Solitaire, maybe Hearts on occasion. I think I tried Bridge once, but that adventure ended quickly. However, one card game does come to mind that I often enjoyed. It was called “BS” in college and another version that I often played with my family was called “Rich Man, Poor Man”. Apparently, this game is referred to as “Big 2” in Asia, and the developers of “Big2Poker” claim that it is one of the more popular games overseas. Honestly, my first thought when seeing the name “Big 2 Poker”, was that this was just going to be another form of Texas Hold’em or another version of an online poker game. Thankfully, I was wrong. 
I was really excited to see a top notch FPS (first person shooter) in the app store. Of course the first thing I wanted to know is how well did the controls work and was it worth the $9.99. When I downloaded it there were no reviews in the App Store on the iPhone and the site I found it on just announced it’s release and did actually review the game play. The download is pretty big (81.6MB) so it takes a few minutes to install even over wifi. I later found some reviews in iTunes on my computer about a problem I was having. The app would just open and just stick on my wallpaper. A lot of people were blaming it on the jailbreak and others said the permissions were set wrong. I decided to go the permissions route since I didn’t want to disable Winterboard. I went to /private/var/mobile/Applications/ and sorted the folders by most recently changed. The top one was this app. You can tell ’cause it will have a subfolder called BIA.app. I changed the folder and subfolder’s permissions to 0755. IT WORKED! I closed the app to reopen it so I could get screenshots of the intros and then the app didn’t work again. I was really frustrated! While I was trying to figure out what to do the app loaded. It seems it just took a few seconds to load. Now the app works fine. 
At $4.99, My Little Tank is a little expensive but still a fun and challenging game. There lots of customizable settings, you can control with the accelerometer or touch screen, and there’s 80 levels. You basically drive the tank around and it automatically shoots for you and you just aim at the bad guys. Some times you go on the attack while other times you defend your home base. It gets harder than I thought and both the touch screen controls and the accelerometer work well. Not only do you attack other tanks and bases but there are bonus items to grab that will give you better weapons, speed or freeze the enemy. Here’s a video from the developer to show a little more detail of the game: 
Blackbeard’s Assault is a game similar to Zuma. The object of the game is to remove all the balls from the path. You do this by matching three or more of the same color balls in a row. I know, sounds like the same old game you have played a million times, but this one is a step above the rest. The graphics are amazing, the game play is smooth, the sound is quality, there are enough levels/difficultly levels to satisfy even the avid game player and it is both addicting and challenging! 
