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Can a 45-year-old man maintain a marriage and a videogame habit? Let's find out!

Review: Word Soup (Kindle)

Word Soup is my latest game addiction on the Kindle.

Sure, books will always be the main attraction on Amazon’s eReader, but Word Soup is good for a change of pace experience with Kindle. The game is well designed to take advantage of Kindle’s 16-level grayscale display, so that the game looks sharp on the platform.

The concept of the game is sort of a reverse Scrabble idea; you start out with a large grid of letters and from adjoining letters you form words. The longer the words, the higher each word scores. The object is to completely clear the board of all letters, which is quite difficult, but for which you earn a significant bonus to your score.

The game plays in relaxed or timed mode, depending on the kind of challenge one is looking for. Sure, it can’t help you buy nurses uniforms, but both of those words would score fairly well in the game.

In all, it’s a great example of targeting the right sort of game to the right sort of platform; Word Soup is a game readers will find appealing and endlessly challenging.

Review: Slingo (Kindle)

With a mixture of slot machines and bingo going for it, Slingo is an interesting game to bring to the reader-centric Kindle platform. The cross-pollination between the casino crowd and the book-reading audience is not necessarily obvious, but as with most games, if it’s fun, people will find it.

To an extent, Slingo is indeed fun. You are given 20 spins to cover an entire bingo card, and this is done through a slot-machine-style interface. There are also slot-machine style challenges to accomplishing this, such as wild-card characters, angels that bonus your score, and devils that cut your score in half.

Slingo is addictive, but only in short bursts; the game gets a bit repetitive after a fashion, so you won’t lose hours in a row on it, but you could lose an hour here and there and have it add up over time. What the game basically lacks is the intellectual challenge of most Kindle-based games, and involve word puzzles and the like.

Still, it’s frivolous fun and sometimes that can be a good thing, too. Definitely more entertaining than a roadside assistance app; in fact, it could be a good companion to that. Use the roadside assistance app to call for help in the event of an auto emergency, and then play Slingo while waiting for help to arrive.

Office Rush for Android

While it may or may not be as good a bargain as finding a decent massage therapy program online, one Android app I’ve appreciated finding of late is Office Rush. While not as crazy-deep as Angry Birds, Office Rush offers a unique visual style to another sort of cross-bred puzzle/platformer game.

The game places you in a career path where you can advance from a janitor’s position, all the way up to a penthouse-owning, jet-flying CEO. But basically it’s a maze of screens and you’re trying to navigate them to complete a task within an certain time limit. The tasks change as you progress, and the complexity grows with each promotion.

Fun little app, and definitely worth the relatively tiny price.

New To Me Review: Angry Birds for Android

I know it’s already taken the world by storm long ago, but I recently gave into pressure and decided to take a flyer on the popular mobile game, Angry Birds. Boy, am I glad I did. It’s a better value than even the cheapest life insurance, because it was free on the Android Market when I bought it. Free!

Now, typically I am no fan of platform style games, but this one’s pretty good and has even me hooked. I love that each of the birds have their own unique abilities, and the game’s puzzles get increasingly harder and harder to solve with the structures you need to destroy and the number and type of birds you are given to accomplish the task.

But really, most people already know what Angry Birds is all about, and for a lot longer than I have. What I’m doing this review for is to simply acknowledge the greatness of the game, and to stand in awe of its value.

My copy of Angry Birds has five or six different groupings of puzzles, and each grouping has something like between 85 to 135 puzzles in it. That’s just crazy depth for a game that I got for free. (My wife has an iPod Touch and got the app for $0.99 in iTunes’ App Store.) It’s a bargain either way, and a new favorite addiction.

Second-gen iPad for a pre-order? What a deal!

The folks over at Out of the Park are really going out of their way to promote Out Of the Park Baseball 12. Last month, they gave away an iPod Touch in a drawing among those who pre-ordered OOTP 12, and this month (February) they are promising to give away a second-generation iPad to one lucky winner. All you need to do is pre-order OOTP 12 by the end of the month.

And the drawing is even open to those who pre-ordered (but didn’t win last month’s drawing) prior to February. That’s pretty darn nice, right? You can find out more here.

And if that doesn’t excite you, you probably need a round of effective fat burners more than the Yankees roster does… and that’s saying something!

For those of you not in the know, Out of the Park Baseball is the gold standard of pro baseball PC sports management sims. It does it all, and better than any of its competitors; of course, being around for eleven previous iterations kind of has that effect; they’ve been at it longer than anyone else.

So if you’re thinking about getting the game at all, pre-order before the month is out and get yourself a chance to receive an iPad 2 in the bargain. What kind of no-brainer is that, right?

I-Play Bowling for Android

It doesn’t take a horse tack to lead gamers to one of the more inventive bowling games released for Android (though it might help). I’m speaking of I-play Bowling, which uses the sensors on your smartphone to turn your Droid into a Wii-mote of sorts.

To bowl, you place your Droid firmly in hand and go through a realistic bowling-toss motion to send the ball down the lane. This can also be accomplished with a less ambitious tip-down, tip-up motion, but isn’t nearly as fun that way.

That’s where the reality factor falls off a bit, though, because how you tilt the phone after the ball starts down the lane can affect the ball’s trajectory after release. The upshot of that is, expect a lot of gutter balls until you get the quirky hang of it.

The challenge level is high because of this design approach. Even after a couple hours, I still had not cracked a score of 100, meaning I’m far worse on I-play than in real life, where I average about 120 on a good night.

Still, it’s a solid, inventive game and deserves kudos for trying something new.

Smartphone, smartphones everywhere…

Now, let me first say that I’m completely happy with my Android phone, the T-Mobile G2 with Google by HTC, but I must also acknowledge that HTC is one great phone maker and I’ve been hearing great things about their HTC Desire 2.2. (Which is practically a G2 clone.)

The benefit? The HTC Desire has the popular Sense UI built in, whereas my G2 is a more “vanilla” Android experience. So, basically, it’s a win-win. If you love vanilla Android, G2 is great. If you love the Sense UI… the Desire is your speed.

Either way, HTC makes great Android phones and is pretty good about pushing OTA updates to the AndroidOS out to existing customers. Yay!

REVIEW: Game Dev Story for Android

I was going to talk a bit about Ipod accessories tonight but I recently finished my first full run-through of Game Dev Story for Android on my T-Mobile G2 with Google phone by HTC, and that seemed a bit more urgent.

Game Dev Story is an industry sim game that focuses on… the videogame industry. For a first entry, it’s not a bad little app, and only sets you back about $2.50 in the Android Marketplace. Or at least that’s what I got it for; they may have been running a half-off special at the time.

That said, you get a lot of value for the money; the game runs through about 20 years of videogame history and gives you a chance to develop for fictional equivalents of every from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo Wii. Strangely, the game skips the Xbox era and goes directly to the Xbox 360, and ignores the PlayStation 3 entirely. It also ignores the mobile era of gaming.

So, there will be plenty of room for expansion in a sequel, if the developers decide to make one.

The game starts you out with a low budget, a thin talent pool, and few options for game types and genres to develop. Everything expands over time in the game, which is great. But it’ll take you about five years to start really turning enough profit to expand operations and build up a sizable bank balance with which to hire better developers and such.

One thing that’s very difficult in the game is to nab a hardware engineer. You need one in order to develop your own game console, but in my first run-through, I never found one. It’s also not an option as a career change. So I imagine it’s a huge Easter egg if you actually pull this off during a replay.

The game rewards repeat play by allowing you to keep the levels you developed in previous run-throughs during replay. That makes it a bit easier to turn a profit.

You start out in a small office with desk space for a staff of four. You get a chance to expand to six, and ultimately to a staff of eight.

That being said, for all the good features and fun play the game offers, I’d be happier with Game Dev Story if it lasted a bit longer and included more platforms to develop for… and even offered an office expansion to a staff of 10, if some variety could be added to job descriptions available.

One of the weaknesses of the game is that specialists like writers, coders, artists and game engineers are eventually outshone by the talent levels of producers and directors, who aren’t such specialists but are given higher scores in certain areas than those specialists.

Ahh, well. It’s a load of fun to play. I just hope there’s a Game Dev Story 2 in the offing, and that it expands and improves upon every element of the game; with added length and depth, this could become an even more addictive app than it already is.

Fishing 2 Go for Android

I’ve found another game I love on the Android Market.

Like most of the games I love, it doesn’t eat a ton of bandwidth; in fact, there’s no multiplayer in it. All it does use the internet for is to check global leaderboards, and then only at your request. So it’s a safe game in that way for users like me on a limited Web plan. Keeps me grounded to the good ol’ laminate floor that way.

Fishing2Go has immediately become my favorite fishing game in eons. Why? One simple reason. All you see is the fisherman’s perspective in the game. Too many fishing games give you a side-scrolling view of your lure in the water, allowing you to entice fish to bite in a very videogame-ish style.

But that is an advantage no real fisherman ever enjoys. All they can do is choose their lures and equipment carefully, and work the area they’re in as best they can. About the only visual aid you get is fishing sonar so you have at least an idea of where groupings are.

This makes for a more realistic experience that lends the game a very nice “fishing simulation” type of feel. And that’s what I like.

I also enjoy the wide variety of lures and equipment, the generous population of fish breeds, and a healthy selection of fishing locales to choose from. About the only thing missing were variable weather effects.

A tournament or career mode might also have been a fun add-on, so long as it’s “off-line” and doesn’t involve multiplayer

The only other gripe is that the fish you catch are all portrayed by the same species picture… it doesn’t matter if you catch a 2-pound largemouth bass, or a 20-pound one; the picture that represents that bass will always be the same. Of course, additional graphics would weigh down this nicely-slim app, so I can live with that.

Available on the Android Market. Only $2.25.

Is there an app for that?

Being new to Android and the Android Market, it is amazing to me how many things there are apps for already. It comes as no surprise to Android veterans, I’m sure; but for me, there’s plenty of novelty to it.

I’ve searched and found apps for everything from something as simple as writing a manuscript on your phone, to something as unique and high in the “wow” factor as home automation. There are many solutions out there, and it’s simply amazing to me how much can be done these days with a smart-phone powered by the Android OS.

Seems like lots of providers are jumping on board, too; it’s no longer the realm of mere programming nerds, but a legitimate value-added feature of many legitimate companies to allow access to some or all of their services through an Android-powered cell phone. It’s not just games out there, people. Not anymore!

Star Traders RPG Elite for Android

One of the first games I got for me new T-Mobile G2 with Google Android phone by HTC was the Star Traders RPG Elite Edition by Cory Trese. Available through the Android Market for a mere $1.99, the game eats absolutely no bandwidth during play (it’s off-line) and asks for no permissions, making it a relatively secure bet.

Furthermore, it’s a hella-fun RPG that starts relatively easy but gets increasingly challenging to manage and succeed at. The graphics may not be quite HDTV-worthy, sure, but they look great on most Android screens.

Right now, for my money, it’s one of the best gaming bargains on the Android Market, bar none.

NYT Crosswords for Kindle

I recently hit “buy” on a New York Times Crossword Puzzle collection for my Kindle. It’s an inexpensive purchase, and I kind of like crossword puzzles, but I must admit that for a kid who grew up doing the crossword in TV Guide, the New York Times puzzles are several steps more challenging.

In fact, the edition I got had 10 easy puzzles, 10 advanced puzzles and 10 challenging puzzles, and even the easy ones are quite challenging, I’ve found. One has to know a bit about everything, from politics to entertainment to construction jobs.

Still, it’s a fun challenge, and the game has plenty of optional help built in if you get really stuck.