iAppLover

The Tycoon series is one that is beloved by people around the world – or at least, was one as the series has found itself outshone by games that can take full advantage of next generation graphics and the like. Fortunately, this generation of gamers doesn’t have to be full of people who’ve never had the joy of a Tycoon game and it’s available on the iPhone to boot – the game is Lemonade Tycoon and it brings to the twenty-first century gameplay that remains fresh today.

Conceptually, it remains similar to its aged brethren. In Lemonade Tycoon, your task is to carve out a Lemonade based empire – not realistic, but it’s still a lot of fun. You start out the way most tycoons portrayed in the sixties do, with a simple lemonade stand by the roadside. From this meager and humble little stand you can begin to shape your empire through various upgrades, from your location to your equipment and even things like salesmen and advertising campaigns.

Advertising campaigns. That’s a surprising amount of depth for something that sits in your hand but it is one that launches the games playability and re-playability into the stratosphere.

If anything, the worst complaint brought on by the original Tycoon games is the way it tends to drive your through the days whether or not you’re ready or prepared. Lemonade Tycoon lets that pressure rest in favor of controlled turns that stop at the end of each hectic day.

Another addition to this iPhone port is that you can use your personal playlist as the game’s background. The music in Lemonade Tycoon for the iPhone is done well enough, but if you want the latest band to play a rock anthem to your rise to power, the option is there. The graphics of the game are rock solid – very slick, very polished and gives the impression of quality. It definitely lives up to its shine with intuitive controls and gameplay

All in all, Lemonade Tycoon stands at the forefront of a long legacy of Tycoon games and delivers exactly what it promises – the ability to make a virtual fortune with a simple glass of lemonade through a wide variety of methods. Casual and somewhat more serious players can appreciate the depth that the game can offer to either kind and thus, is definitely a good option for people who want a change of pace from the many action games littering the gaming landscape.

Epic Pet Wars goes against everything our parents ever taught us. We’re not supposed to like it when any living thing gets hurt. We’re not supposed to make animals fight each other, but lo, have times changed, especially on a digital level. Thanks to Pokemon, it makes perfect sense to some people to hurl trained animals into battle against each other and Epic Pet Wars continues this tradition.

It’s an iPhone based App that also works through Facebook. With around 25,000 members running around, sending balls of fluff into battle, playing it allows you to step into a world filled with animal cruelty and fun. You start by picking a species of pet that appeals to you, with each species with different advantages and disadvantages, you give it a name. From there, your job is to make a strong pet to win battles with and of course, create a posse – much in the same way that a mob is formed in another famous Facebook application, Mafia wars.

It follows the standard fare of statistics, from HP to Energy and so forth. Energy is used for more than fighting, it’s used for foraging, training and of course, petting. PETA, don’t worry – it’s not that strange kind of petting. You need to give your pet some loving and reassurance whenever it loses.

As Epic Pet Wars has the word wars in it, you can expect battle to feature majorly in the game. Unlike many games with a similar system, it provokes more action than simply waiting for the results of your latest battle. If you’ve ever played a console RPG, you’ll recognize the commands immediately, in this case, Attack, Flee and Use an Item. The battle is turn-based. Just like most RPGs, you gain experience and money and you can purchase items such as weapons and armor to make your cute widdle monster into a battling fiend.

You can even invest to provide your creature with constant income. The best part about Epic Pet Wars and one that many Mafia style game players would enjoy is that battling requires no energy at all, which means you can battle as long as your pet is able to. As is always the case with games, there’s a slight hitch – one, the design of the game obviously suggests that you can only play when you’re online. The worst part of it is that there are some options only available to paying customers, which means that if you want, you can literally pay your way into the leaderboards.

Overall, it’s an App that’s really hit and miss for a lot of people, but if you’re going to play a Mafia Style Game, Epic Pet Wars should be on your list of games to try. It’s filled with enough clever innovations to make it stand out from the crowd.

It’s gotten to the point where Apple can actually say their iPhone is an actual contender for mobile gaming. It may not be as complex as offerings from Nintendo and Sony, but it appears to have its own wide selection of games for the iPhone and some of them are even free. Flood It is one of those games that could be good if bought and fantastic if gotten for free.

Flood It is one of those simple games that aren’t around to wow you or turn your world on its head – it has been often compared to a multi-colored minesweeper, one that needs you to open up a screen filled with so many different colors into a single color, the way the KKK must think of in their intellectual discussions while they teach the younguns how to knot a noose.

Flood It always requires you to start from the upper left corner. Like that ancient puzzle, every time you click on something you change the colors of the square you clicked as well as adjacent squares. It looks easy until it dawns on you that you’ve only got twenty two moves to do it in, like some odd reference to catch-22, a saying that hasn’t been used in media for half a decade.

There are different difficulty levels, offering a greater number of squares to work through, though with more moves. Unfortunately, it’s as difficult as winning a pie eating contest after chugging down a gallon of milk and sewing your mouth shut. Yep, it’s very, very difficult. While there are those out there that will find this preferable to a crossword that refers to obscure Broadway shows in the 50s, there are better options.

Fortunately the game is free – if this had a price, this game would be overshadowed by other, more polished games. The fact that it isn’t designed in a way to show you that it is always solvable can be very frustrating. The random assortment of colors on the screen sometimes suggests that it’s actually impossible to get anywhere productive with Flood It.

Like many free games it’s definitely worth a look and a twiddle. The graphics are very, very simple and you can’t fault the designers for that as it is a very simple game but you can’t help but think that there’s a way to make squares a lot more interesting to stare at. Try it out – downloading is free.

F-mylife – well, no, I’m okay with mine. I’m referring to that ever popular website that feeds and relies on the idea of schadenfraude, or finding joy in another person’s suffering or embarrassment. Sounds mean? Well, that’s pretty much the home and heart of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and a vast majority of other reality tv shows and even some fictional ones, like the Three Stooges. Like Tvtropes or a long-running webcomic, it’s a chrono-vore, a time vampire that threatens to mug people of their sweet sweet time with short stories of unfortunate things that have occurred to other people.

There’s no real price that you could put on a nigh infinite source of embarrassment, especially it’s not your own. F-mylife on the iPhone offers you constantly updated news on the bad and personal things that people share around the world. There’s no such thing as bad news now – only F-mylife news. Now you can make sure that you never, ever miss out.

These anecdotes can be conversation starters or time wasters, depending on your need. This is best for people who just want to relax their minds when they’re on a break or resting. You’re going to hear a lot about people who want to keep their minds sharp with constant exercise by playing puzzle games while they’re on their break.

The stories themselves are categorized, from sex to health to the miscellaneous for people who can’t quite pigeonhole their shame. If you’re in the mood for some shameful sex secrets, here you go. If you’re not quite sure, the miscellaneous section will probably find you something interesting.

I personally don’t think it’s a good idea to whine. I’m among the “Law of Attraction” and think it’s important to be grateful. If you feel anything like me, you might not get a kick out of this app.

F-mylife is for people who enjoy and wallow in the shame of other people, anonymous as it may be (I guess it’s some kind of guilty pleasure that is especially appealing to the younger crowd). The app itself is relatively simple and at the moment, doesn’t offer as many options as the actual website would. Happily, that should be fixed soon. Besides, the important part, the meat of the stories, is still there and ready for your perusal. If you’re not sure if it’s the kind of thing you read, you can check out the original at fmylife.com and see if you want to be carrying that around in your pocket.

If you’ve ever wanted an external brain, well, apparently Evernote is the way to go. It’s a simple organizing program that allows people to organize their lives, though with some very neat options. The iPhone literally has hundreds of options out on the internet, but Evernote has been getting some of the best reviews out there.

It lets you organize things into folders called notebooks, which allows for a maximum level of organization. It takes several cues from its desktop brethren by allowing several views of these customize categories, such as a simple text based list view to the traditional thumbnail folder view. This makes spotting the information you’re looking for as easy as possible. Whatever text you enter into Evernote can be edited in a variety of ways – certainly more than your average text file as you can change fonts and italicize the letters, among other things.

One of the biggest advantages of an organizer program as opposed to a notebook is that you can, usually, search for a specific item that you’ve entered. Geotagging or putting in specific coordinates along with a note to add a new dimension to organizing your notes. While combining that use with a GPS program is still in the works, it promises to be very useful for people who travel a lot or even people who like making various notes about places around the world.

Incidentally, Evernote also has the neat capability of looking for text in pictures, which is always a fancy option to have especially with the rise of internet memes. Of course, you need to have Evernote index the images first – it’s a program, not magic. This also means that if your writing is more akin to a doctor’s scribbling than a street sign, you probably won’t get the outcome or search result that you’re looking for.

One of the more intriguing options offered by Evernote to the average person is that if you have something you want friends and or co-workers to look at, there’s an option to publish stuff. Publishing notebooks means that you can easily share that stock of funny pictures on that trip to Tulsa or whatnot. You could even use it for work, allowing you to send files without a second thought.

Incidentally, for those who’re secretive or have work that require some form of secrecy, Evernote offers selective text encryption. Evernote makes your iPhone into a literal mobile desktop, even allowing you to send in some photos that you’ve taken with it to yourself. The aforementioned picture text searching is of course, done automatically.

The greatest part about all this is that Evernote is a very, very young app – which means it has so much more to grow into. This isn’t the end of the line, it’s the beginning of something amazing and a worthy addition to the arsenal of anyone who wants to organize their life a little more or even for people who want to share while on the road with their iPhone. It promises to grow into a program that many people will find integral to their lives.

Now free games don’t usually need reviews. After all, they’re free – it costs nothing but time to check them out. Trace is one of those few games that definitely deserves a shot and a review. You reap what you sow generally, but Trace gives you a lot more for the price, or the lack of it anyway. It’s an iPhone game that you may enjoy.

With an on-screen controller, you and your avatar, a little red line, to a little swirly thing. Yeah, that might be vague, but it’s really the best way to describe it. It’s a side-scrolling adventure with the pits, spikes and all other kinds of crazy stuff that run around side-scrollers. Obstacles are plentiful. It throws wave after wave of levels after you until you finish it, which each level being timed. Your final score is the sum total of all the time you spent in the levels and much like golf and limbo, the lower the better.

Trace gets its name from your ability to draw in different routes and paths to the final destination. You can make these routes and lines anywhere on the screen for your line avatar to run around in. Bridges, walls and everything else – they’re all waiting for you to draw them in. Perhaps you want some protection from the pits that Mario hates, or perhaps you need to get to a higher area.

The graphics are childish, which is perfect for the theme and genre and the mechanics of the game. Now, an iPhone isn’t exactly a gaming machine but the game runs smoothly – no lag whatsoever, no matter how much stuff is on the screen. It looks like the designers and maker had plenty of fun making the game itself, which really shows when you get into it.

There are six main worlds offered in this free game. Like most things, it starts with the most basic shapes, until you get to well done areas. A fan favorite is the chalkboard level, where you adventure with your red line through math problems and symbols. Okay, that may be a nightmare for some people but it’s still a load of fun. With a massive twenty levels per world, Trace brings to your iPhone one hundred and twenty levels for you to adventure in.

The music for each world is very fitting – you would think that bringing the atmosphere to something that seemed like it was made in Microsoft Paint would be impossible, but they actually manage to do it. If anything, the real trouble in the game comes from the onscreen control pad, which causes some trouble. Sometimes, you just don’t get the button you want and you go spiraling into pits. If they polished the controls just a little more, this would actually be a game that many people would pay for.

Pakoon 3 iPhone Game

When you see the words “Pakoon 3”, you’re probably going to immediately wonder where Pakoons 1 and 2 are. Thing is, there is no prequel to Pakoon 3, a game on the iPhone that could easily entertain you whether or not you’re on your break.

Now, there are plenty of genres of games running around. PLENTY.  Everything from mini-rpgs to highly complex puzzle games is available for people to play.  Free or costly, it’s there, especially if you’re savvy enough with Google to find the game that’s just right for you.

And then, there are the eccentrics who remember the fond glory days of a game called Lemmings, where you had to guide a bunch of mindless yet cute little critters to safety through a variety of increasingly convoluted methods.  Pakoon 3 is a proud member of that guiding little critters genre, except here, instead of green haired idiots, you get to guide super-cute widdle baby chicks. (They are freakin’ adorable, I’m tellin’ ya…)

There’s one massive difference of course – in Lemmings, we had plenty of tools to achieve the aforementioned hyper-convoluted objective of getting them to their safe zone.  Girders, ladders, parachutes – you’ve got plenty of options.  In Pakoon 3, you get a bunch of high explosives, limited in number for each stage.  Your objective is to clear a path for these chicks using these explosives.  Click onscreen blows stuff up.  That alone will probably draw in a crowd, actually, but again, you’re supposed to blow stuff up to clear a path.

If can explode, it will explode and if it can’t, it will merely be thrown far aside.  Physics also applies here, as objects above an explosion fall down.  As said before, the number of bombs that you can use varies per level, making the game a matter of figuring out which things to explode to make that critical path for your chicks.

Scoring, unlike Lemmnings, is a matter of doing things quickly. The nature of the game also implies that you can get stuck in a level, forcing a restart.

The iPhone version of this game is particularly rewarding.  For people who like to watch their budget, the fact that this fun game is free should immediately draw their attention and favor.  Another bonus is that the levels on this version are unique, so even people who’ve played an earlier version of Pakoon can find themselves in wholly unfamiliar waters.

If anything, the only flaw this game has is that it lacks replay value – once you know how to beat a stage, that’s pretty much it for that stage.  If we’re all lucky, new stages would be available for download, further extending and improving its worth.  Even without those extra levels, it’s still a good choice for entertainment on a boring car ride or a slow day.

Tap Tap Revenge 2 iPhone Game

Rhythm games are probably the best thing that happened to gamers.  Most games (short of some games on the Wii),  aren’t known for promoting the development of reflexes and hand eye coordination.  Some games are a matter of memorization, others tax your planning and legendary and revolutionary games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero have brought a different kind of fun to the console and arcade game.

Luckily for us proud iPhoners, we’ve got Tap Tap Revenge (and Tap Tap Revenge 2).

As far as rhythm games go, Tap Tap Revenge follows the standard formula of lights coming down the screen on a track and you tapping when the time is right or when they reach their mark.  Instead of a guitar as in the popular game however, you merely tap the correct point at the exact time.  You won’t exactly be a rock star, but that’d be asking a lot from your iPhone.

Besides, it still offers a tremendously engaging experience – engaging enough that playing during a break or a subway ride might make you miss your mark or your stop.

The music offered by a rhythm game goes a long way towards its popularity. Unfortunately, as the game itself is free, we can’t expect Metallica to come cruising along with a classic riff.  Look elsewhere for your expected songs – look for indy artists to find fame here.  Luckily, the game designers understood that not everyone’s been taken in by the rhythm game craze, including a helpful tutorial to those who’re using this as a gateway into the genre.

Replayability is fantastic.  True to its roots, music can be downloaded from various sites to allow more games. Global leaderboards are also available for the competitive, so if you’ve got some pride in you, there’s a place to show it.

A Tap Tap Revolution update also offers picture support.  If you want people to know that it really is you with that high score, now you can prove it.  Multiplayer support in this game is a godsend, again for the competitive.  The players play on opposite sides of the screen.

There may be some trouble as you could inadvertently shake the phone, which is a part of the gameplay, but if you’re careful, you’re in for some heads up action.

If you’re looking for an immersive free game, this’ll whet your appetite.  Even if you aren’t, it is, after all, free – all it needs is your time and a download and you can see if it’s something you can enjoy.