You Should Probably Buy Scribblenauts Today

Lemme tell you a story of why you should buy Scribblenauts Remix for your iPhone/iPad today. First of all, it's a pretty sweet game, and an updated version of a Nintendo DS game that came out a while back. You basically write down objects (and by objects I mean any object) and use those objects to accomplish tasks within levels. Tiny yellow dogs? Yeah, the game has them. Giant hungry rainbow beavers? You betcha. Also, the game is a universal iPhone/iPad app, and comes in at only 136MB, which is a bit of a feat in and of itself.

Oh yeah and it's $.99 today. Just think about all of those crappy apps you bought for that same price. You know, the ones you keep on your iPhone just because you paid for it and you might get to it someday. This my friend, is your redemption, staring back at you all giddy and twinkly-eyed.

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Metro 2033: The Russian Language Tool

As a speaker of Russian (albeit not a great one), I was excited to find out that PC/Xbox 360/PS3 game Metro 2033 has an option to play the entire game in Russian. It makes sense considering that the game's developer, 4A Games, is located in the Ukraine. Metro 2033 received fair-to-good reviews when it came out last year, and I only got a chance to sit down with the game this afternoon - so there's nothing I can say that hasn't been said already in terms of gameplay other than to confirm that it plays fairly well although the combat is a little wonky and the animation seems a little off.

Instead, I want to tackle the idea of using this game as something different - not as a form of mindless entertainment, but as a language tool for enthusiasts that want to practice their fluency.

The game is already set up for an immersive experience that fits your language level - you can toggle the audio, in-game text, and subtitles in either Russian or English, allowing you to pick and choose how you want to experience the game. Initially I chose Russian for the spoken language but with English subtitles - which is a disaster considering you have to concentrate on listening to Russian while following the text in English while also playing the damn game. I also noticed drastic differences in the Russian and English text. Simply put, the English translation is a watered-down version of the original Russian, which contains full sentences that weren't carried over to English. So in the end I switched to Russian without subtitles but with English text for things like the objectives list and pause menu.

Playing the game in Russian is pretty tough for me, but it's a unique experience to tackle the game as a foreigner. There isn't a lot of repeated dialogue so everything also seems fresh. The wording is poetic at times, especially during the between-chapters monologues. Many of the characters talk over each other, which makes it even harder to piece together what everyone is saying. Although there are plenty of times when I simply don't understand what they want me to do, having the objectives list in English clears everything up nicely; once I get the hang of the game I'll try changing that to Russian as well.



Overall, playing this game in another language is weird - I'm enjoying the game and also feel like I'm accomplishing more than just being entertained. The game is at a bargain-bin pricing level right now, so regardless of your command of the Russian language, you might find something worth your time and money here.

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Free iPhone GPS App: Waze

I may have stumbled upon my favorite iPhone app of the year. You see, lately I've been looking for a good GPS iPhone app; my Garmin is now three years old, and doesn't have lifetime maps, so it's becoming increasingly useless - in fact, it now consistently tells me the wrong way to go more often than not. Initially, I thought I would upgrade and get a better GPS, but it's also annoying to carry around a bunch of gadgets when my phone does so much already. Hell, it's already replaced my iPod (for the most part), Nintendo DS, guitar tuner, notepad, alarm clock, camera, and TV remote - why shouldn't it replace my GPS, too? Garmin sells a GPS iPhone app, but it's $40, over 1GB in size, and as far as I can tell it doesn't have map updates, either.

Enter Waze. It's a free app, which comes with fully featured turn-by-turn GPS navigation, real-time traffic reporting and police speed traps (user-generated), alternative routes, and a bunch of social incentives to keep people generating the traffic tips. It's also available on Android and Blackberry.

For me, it's a perfectly practical app: I plug my iPhone into my car stereo, and the voice prompts will dim my music down a bit and tell me where and when to turn. It will reroute me if it knows there's traffic ahead, but it also adjusts itself based on my traffic patterns - if I take a certain route to work every day, it will learn my preferences. You can adjust how often it gives you voice prompts as well. Every morning, I turn it on and it calculates the fastest way for me to get to work based on current traffic patterns, which saves me time every single day.

Being that the app is only 18MB in size, it uses your cell phone data plan to stream its maps and traffic data, and initially I was afraid that it was going to eat up my data plan. Turns out I have nothing to fear - on a 45-minute trip it only uses about 1MB of cell phone data.

The only bad thing I can say about the app is that I had a hard time figuring out how to save my current location (you just hold your finger down on the location on your map to save it). I should also mention that the reason it works so well for me is that I have my iPhone plugged directly into my stereo; it'd probably be annoying to have to listen to it through the iPhone's internal speaker. Still, I couldn't be happier with this free app, and I would say it's a necessary part of any smartphone. Check out Waze.com for more info and some informative video tutorials.

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The Misinformed Informant: Puss in Boots

Really??? Puss in Boots??? I have one thing to say to you, Hollywood:



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How to Transfer Infinity Blade Game Saves Between iPads, iPhones, etc

Today I upgraded my turn-of-the-century iPhone 3GS for the new-hotness iPhone 4S. One of the first things I was looking forward to was playing Infinity Blade on my iPhone - my 3GS was too sluggish to play it properly and I have only ever played it on my 1st-gen iPad. Which means I've never really had the luxury of playing this game "on the go". However, I had a pretty good chunk of the game completed on the iPad (I'm currently at level 42) and I didn't want to start all over again. Since the game doesn't support any sort of cloud-based game saves, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

First of all, you will want to sync and back up both devices so that you don't get all mad at me if you screw this up.

Download the free iExplorer (formerly "iPhone Explorer"), which works on both PC and Macs. Next, plug in your iDevice that has the game save you want, and open iExplorer. Navigate to Apps > Infinity Blade > Documents and you should find a file called "SwordSave.bin", which is the game save file. Drag the file to your desktop (or somewhere else that's handy) and unplug your iDevice. Plug in the iDevice that you want to play the game on, and this time move that "SwordSave.bin" file to the same directory. Viola! The next time you open the game it will be exactly where you left off on your previous iDevice.

Keep in mind that in order for this to work, both iDevices need to be attached to the same Apple ID, and that this whole process may not be necessary if you are simply upgrading from one iPhone/iPad to another generation, since they should transfer everything over for you when you activate your new device.

This was so easy that I'm going to go through my iDevices and start making backups of my game saves (keeping in mind that some saves are different file types - ".bin" vs ".dat", etc) in case something goes wrong in the future. I've heard that cloud saving is a part of iCloud, but I am not sure if it's being fully implemented yet - and with game saves only being about 30kb in size, it makes sense that something so tiny and precious should be backed up a more securely.

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Comic Review: Swamp Thing: Love and Death

To be honest, I don't know much about Swamp Thing other than the movies and short-lived TV show from my childhood, but given that Alan Moore is well known for his work with the series I figured I should check it out. Swamp Thing: Love and Death is a collection of Swamp Thing 29-34 and Swamp Thing Annual 2, which were originally published in 1984 and 1985. The book deals with a large section of the Swamp Thing mythos, including his origin and a bit of his emerging love life. Throughout the course of the book he journeys through hell and back, with Moore doing some heavy literary lifting.

Moore's issues were definitely ground-breaking at the time: the content here is far beyond the realm of everyday comics and pushes some pretty heavy existential stuff onto the reader. It's definitely a part of the adult-centered focus that Alan Moore perfected in Watchmen. Honestly, at this point in his career it seems to me that Moore could have taken any character - say, Humpty Dumpty - and made a pretty compelling glimpse into their psyche. His use of tricks like page orientation might be par for the course today, but for 1984-1985 it seems pretty ingenious and triply.

Lastly, there are a couple side stories included (with some Sandman-universe cameos to boot) which bring a good amount of variety to the mix. One of the stories in particular, which is a thinly-veiled allegory of our destruction of the planet, is a timeless little story that closes the collection out smartly.

In all, this collection makes a compelling read (both with and without the fact that it's Swamp Thing), and is a good option for anyone looking for something a little headier than the typical comic book fare. If you're a fan of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, this book should be of particular interest to you thanks to its similarity in focus and style.

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The Misinformed Informant: The Three Musketeers

Turning a candy bar into a film is a risky move, but if you’re going to do it, you should absolutely do it in 3D! Paul Anderson (former beau of Fiona Apple, now putting it in Milla Jovovich) does just that with Three Musketeers, a tale of chocolaty goodness and also swords. And it’s in 3D! I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for the newest 3D movie. It seems like it has been years since we’ve had a new one. 3D!!!

The Three Musketeers are Athos, Porterhouse and Harold Ramis. I can only assume that they represent the parts of the candy bar: the outer chocolate, the inner, whipped chocolate, and the edible wrapper. The film does an excellent job at conveying the wonderful, stabbing pains you get in your stomach when you eat a 3 Musketeers bar by making the heroes into skilled swordsmen. Every time one of their shiny blades exited the screen I could actually feel the point of their rapier invade my abdomen, which made me giddy. Several times I found myself laughing like a wild man to the point where tears were streaming down my face and mucus ran from various other holes in my body. Once I even screamed, “Pin! Prick! Pin! Prick!” right before I sprayed the three candy bars I had eaten during the opening credits all over Troy, who had come with me because it was his mom’s Tupperware night with the guys. He was not happy and did not enjoy the film, but he does not understand the power of metaphor.

I have to admit, I did not view the last 20 minutes of the movie as I blacked out and was taken to the hospital. They said something about Mylar poisoning yadda yadda yadda. Same thing they say every time I visit. They just want to ruin my fun. I tell you what, if I die of 3D poisoning, I will be the happiest man on earth! In fact, I’m going to see this three dimensional winner again. Right now! Who’s coming with me?!

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aMusic and gMusic: New Native iPhone Music Players

You may remember my recent post about all of the streaming music services, especially the part when I whined about no proper iPhone apps for the Amazon and Google streaming music services. Today I discovered that two apps have been released by Interactive Innovative Solutions LLC (that's quite a trio of business buzzwords) that are native music players for each of those services.

aMusic is a native Amazon Cloud music player, and gMusic is a native Google Music player. Both cost $1.99, which seems reasonable. I personally bought the aMusic app today and it seems to work fine, although it definitely doesn't show all of my music - only about 25% of it seems to appear. Hopefully this is something that will smooth itself out as it stays connected.

Unfortunately, neither solution addresses my last.fm scrobbling issue, but I emailed the developer and they said that it's on their to-do list. With iTunes Match's imminent release (some are predicting the next day or so), things should get interesting really soon!

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Demotopia!: Kinect Sports: Season Two

The Kinect Sports: Season Two demo came out today. I'm a little upset that Rare went ahead and and made a sequel less than a year after its predecessor was released (you know, instead of adding more content - what is this, Left 4 Dead 2 all over again?), but whatever, I decided to give it a whirl.

The original Kinect Sports remains my favorite Kinect game, but it suffered from a wonky menu system and super long load times. Off the bat you can tell that some time and effort was put into the menus and overall feel of the game. Everything is snappier, brighter, and more intuitive. You can select each option with your hands or by voice, and both seemed to work really well.

The demo offers one hole of golf and one game of tennis. To play golf, you stand to your side and step forward or backward to aim your shot. You then just swing, and the speed of your swing determines the power of your shot. Putting is the same, just with a smaller swing. There is a nice addition in that you can kneel down before putting to get a better line on the ball, just like real golfers. I think it's going to be hard to play golf with any sort of pinpoint precision, and rather you'd probably just want to play this section to have some laughs.

Tennis is very similar to the Wii Sports version, minus the controller. You serve as you would in real tennis, and then just rally with the opponent. I was hoping for a little foot action, but as far as I can tell you are supposed to just stand there. In fact, the gameplay is nearly identical to the table tennis game in the first Kinect Sports. Because you don't have any sort of feedback for your shots, it never feels like you're hitting the ball, which is disorienting. All in all, I think I like playing tennis in Wii Sports more.

So I guess while the menus definitely seem much better, it's hard to imagine shelling out a full $50 based on the merits of this demo alone. It's a shame they didn't include the other sports (darts, baseball, skiing, football) because some of them could probably be pretty fun.

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Batman: Arkham City and the Pre-Order Bonus Debacle