Occasional Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
Developers SwanAngel promise a lot in the Ovi Store description of their latest game: “[IronPlane] is a arcade shooter where you take control of a advanced aircraft and fight aliens in different worlds.” If only they could design an arcade game that’s as slick and skilled as their copywriters, they might have a hit on their hands.
Symbian Anna, the first “name” update to Symbian^3 is now in the Over the Air channels for the Nokia N8, E7, C7, C6-01. Should I update, or wait a bit and see what happens to Rafe and Steve’s phones? I’m in the nice position of having more than one, so for a while the E7 will stay on the older, and the C6-01 (the gorgeous little pocket Nokia that I love) gets to be on the shiny new firmware. There’ll be a lot of noise from the geekerati about the timescale of delivery, but will the man or woman on
There’s a lot that can go wrong when you write a karting game, the shadow of Mario Kart is very long, but the conventions have been set by many titles. So Shrek Kart HD needs to fit in with those, work well, and make itself attractive to the end user. Gameloft manages to achieve all that, but does it scale the dizzy heights of a classic? Nope, but it’s still worthwhile. Here’s why..
To Do applications have always been popular in portable computing – be it the PDA or the smartphone, keeping track of what needs doing is an admirable goal. In a way it upsets me that nobody has really been able to get a killer-app in this space. Yes, there are some efforts that get close, but one To-Do to To-Do them all? Not yet. And that includes Quick Milk.
But here’s the thing that lifts iStunt 2 out of the regular accelerometer powered balancing game. Alongside the rotating of your smartphone clockwise or anticlockwise to change the orientation of your courageous snowboarder, you have a few extra controls to provide more flexibility to the level designer (and a bigger challenge to you).
Didn’t Android fanboys spend all their time saying Symbian numbers shouldn’t count because they were cheap handsets that nobody uses as smartphones? There are huge and statistically significant quantities of Android devices made by Huawei, ZTE or Alcatel that are pushed into carriers sales channels for 70-100 bucks cost, each. Is anybody writing a review on them or make a fuss about these companies’ financials? Never. Will you ever be able to count those low-end-smartphones’ online visits, connections, internet usage, social network presence? Never. Because they’re never used as smartphones!
