And here is an iPhone/iPad game called Hipster City Cycle, in which you ride your fixie through Philadelphia streets, eating cheesesteaks and being groovy, man. It's like a Farmville for the barely-employed set! But it addresses an important question in gaming now: do we really want to play games that so closely resemble our real lives? (Kidding.)
The human mind, for whatever reason, is built for challenges and puzzles. (What are running and jumping and fighting games but a great use for the part of our brain that used to have to hide from and hunt mammoths and tigers?) At their best, they get to engage the front of your mind while the back focuses on thinking through bigger life challenges. Worst case scenario? Mobile and flash games let you tear up a few idle hours and set aside the worries of the day.
The casual game market is divided into a few distinct types. And most people will really only love one or two genres [...]
The world's dumbest iPhone application has arrived! I am maybe in love with it a little. It is called Le Petit Dummy [warning: iTunes link!] and it is dumb as hell, what with the making of things talk and combining sound files and pictures and the fake mouths and stuff. It makes me want to smoke pot all day.
A hundred-thousand screams were heard last night, when it was announced that a startup called Color had gotten $41 million in investment money—pre-launch. It has seven founders! It's a social photography iPhone app! They paid $350,000 for the url "color dot com"! (Which is just a "click-here for the app store!) And it is now live.
Basically, Color finds people around you, and so you can see (and have) everyone's photos from around you. (Everyone who is also using Color, that is.) The tech sounds wildly impressive! (And high-bandwidth—it samples audio around you to match up devices that are "hearing" the same things? Whoa.) The case can be [...]
There's already a Shake Shack iPhone app that lets you look at the burger joint's line via live camera, so you know before you go over there just how much bitching on Twitter you will do while waiting for a sorta decent burger in Madison Square Park. Now there is an app, we have been notified, called Shakedown (that is an iTunes store link! This is their website) that will sync with FourSquare (the fun/ridiculous/scary app that tells your "friends" where "you are") so as to ID your friends already in line so that you can therefore jump in and butt ahead of plebes who are not [...]
Most people spend their app pennies and time on effects apps for photos. Everyone has Instagram, so they can put scratchy, slightly out of focus, over-saturated pictures on their Tumblrs, and it looks so meaningful. This is a thing that people really like doing, and even those of us who disapprove must learn to accept it. Instagram is the top free photography app in the Apple store! So the people have spoken. Go on, download it, I know you want to.
Likewise, Hipstamatic is the #3 paid app right now. Hipstamatic also "processes" your digital pictures to make them look old-timey film-ey. So this is a look [...]
There is a new iPhone app called "2Balls1Cup." I don't know what it's about, because THERE IS NO WAY you will get me to look at that. Look for yourselves, if you want, I don't care, it's your life.
