iPhone app reviews so you don't waste your money.

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Tric-Trac (Seahorse Software): Roll The Dice, Pick Some Numbers, Do It Again

★✩✩✩✩ (iTMS)

I’m not exactly sure what Tric-Trac is trying to accomplish. You roll the dice and pick numbers that add up to the number rolled until you can’t do it anymore.

The game is neither addictive nor captivating. You can shake the iPhone to roll the dice or you can press the “roll” button but there are no pretty animations found in other dice games, just a few still-pictures strung together as an animation.

When you finish a game, the new game button isn’t flush with the rest of the screen making the game feel very unfinished and unpolished.

Sure for $0.99 you don’t expect the next Rolando but this isn’t even worth that dollar. Free games are more stable than this, sadly.

Tric-Trac needs work.

8 months ago on March 6th, 2009 at 7:11 pm | Permalink

CameraBag (Nevercenter Ltd. Co.): Taking pictures on an iPhone has never been so slow

★✩✩✩✩ (iTMS)

Nevercenter’s Photobag application comes with five filters to use with new, incoming pictures and old saved pictures. The filters are all pretty dull and useless, nothing you’d ever apply to a picture and show to your friends. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would look at one of the pictures that you’ve passed through Photobag and be excited by them. It’s just a dull app.

Photobag is on sale this week for $2.99. They promise an update real soon but sadly not much can fix this dull, slow app.~~Zack Shapiro

1 year ago on October 9th, 2008 at 2:32 am | Permalink

Speed (Steven Troughton-Smith) vs. SpeedBox (Hans Schneider): The Beauty and The Beast

Speed - ★★★✩✩ (iTMS) vs. SpeedBox - ★✩✩✩✩ (iTMS)

I’m not sure what Mr. Schneider was thinking. This is the iPhone. It’s got style. It’s glossy, damnit! You’ve gotta make it beautiful! Oh, and it would help if your app could actually measure the speed, too.

Speed: Nice looks, got all the options of SpeedBox, and does accurate measurements. Good going, Steven!

1 year ago on August 4th, 2008 at 12:48 am | Permalink

Barcode (Stefan Hafeneger): Fails every time

★✩✩✩✩ (iTMS)

Never been able to decode a single barcode. Frequently crashes. Bad UI. Can’t even detect where in the picture the code is, and the UI for selecting it yourself is seriously broken. Avoid.

1 year ago on August 2nd, 2008 at 8:33 pm | Permalink

Circulate P. (Lemonquest): Counter-intuitive, annoying and boring.

★✩✩✩✩

Incredibly annoying to watch twenty seconds of banners, intros and logos before even getting to the menu (which is very counter-intuitive). As for the game play, it’s just annoying. You get a split second to rotate your iphone a quarter circle to put your colored ball in its own pile, but there’s also inertia so the rotation isn’t instantaneous, so unless there are several balls of the same color appearing after each other, you don’t have much chance of scoring.

Admittably, I’ve only tried the game for a few minutes: I got too frustrated with it to try it properly. (iTMS)

1 year ago on August 2nd, 2008 at 8:32 pm | Permalink

Air Hockey (Personae Studios L.L.P.): No polish, no multiplayer, awkward steering

★✩✩✩✩ (iTMS)

First and foremost, the lack of single iPhone multiplayer for an air hockey game is just sort of inexcusable. Secondly, having the puck in front of the finger helps with playing without obscuring the playing field in front of you, but it’s not uncommon to want to see behind you, which you can’t do with the finger blocking. Tried horizontal offset but steering only felt awkward that way. Didn’t like the game, deleted it even though I paid for it.

1 year ago on August 2nd, 2008 at 8:32 pm | Permalink