You know those super special apps that reside on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, always ready, always in use? The ones that you recommend to friends and family over and over?

Well, we’ve got those, too, and we spend a LOT of time with different apps around here. Every so often, we come across something that’s so good, so unique to us as individuals, that we needed a way to share it with you.

So here it is: Our Favorites. A curated set of themed lists that give you our very favorite apps for a variety of uses and personality types. Are you a Bored Core Gamer? Do you feel like a Social (Network) Butterfly? Do you consider yourself a Fresh Music Seeker? Well, we’ve got a Favorite list for you, culled from our own experiences in and around the iOS App Store.

Check them out, won’t you? We’ll be releasing a new list regularly, so come back often and soon.

Deirdra Kiai is a young game developer with several games to the good, including the most recent, Dominique Pamplemousse, a “stop motion musical detective adventure game” that’s available on Mac, Windows, and iPad. Here’s a quick preview, with Deirdra’s own singing voice as the lead character:

We had a chance to sit down with Deirdra this past GDC week, and chatted a bit about Deirdra’s game development experience, the choice of gender-neutral protagonists, and some of the techniques that went into making the current game. Some of the interview has been edited for clarity.

148Apps: How many games have you made now?

Deirdra Kiai: Well, I’ve been making games ever since the early 2000s. It started out as a hobby in high school. So there are probably maybe at least ten or so games I’ve done that are available on my website. I have a reverse chronological order portfolio on my site so you can kind of see the evolution of what i’ve done there.

If you had to describe the evolution of your style of your games in a sentence or two, how would you do that?

Hm, a sentence or two? I started out heavily inspired by classic Lucas arts adventure games, (which is) apparent even today. But as I went on, I started incorporating so many more influences, particularly from interactive fiction and basically narrative-based, choice-based narrative games that aren’t necessarily always about puzzle solving but have some kind of interesting story you can explore and some kind of personal twist to it. So a big part of my evolution has been incorporating more of the personal into my work.

So when you say the personal, do you mean the characters or yourself?

Kind of both. The characters I write have a lot to do with myself and the people I know and just thoughts and feelings I have and sometimes the characters I write embody those.

Would you say your work is becoming more personal over time?

Absolutely.

So, Dominique, how do you say the last name?

Pamplemousse. It’s the French word for grapefruit.

Why ‘grapefruit’?

I just think it’s a cool word. It just sounds cool. it’s like an early detective–a big French detective name and I’ve always liked pamplemousse. I want a character named Pamplemousse. And what’s a good gender-neutral French sounding name? Dominique.

The gender neutral thing is a big part of this game, and the last one you made, as well. Tell us a bit more about it?

Well the genesis of the whole idea of doing a gender-neutral protagonist came with some of my past games featuring female characters and protagonists–I have a very androgynous drawing style for characters. I don’t like to sexualize women. I like to design characters who I can empathize with, and that goes for female and male and whatever. And so in (my previous game), Life Flashes By, I had several comments along the lines of, “I didn’t know I was playing a woman! Charlotte totally looks like a man! She’s got a square jaw and everything.” And I was thinking I wanted to play with this a bit. I want to play with this expectation that cartoon characters and gender that you have to explicitly show tertiary and secondary characteristics if you’re going to, like Minnie Mouse is Mickey Mouse with a bow on her head and Ms. Pac-man is a Pac-man with a bow on her head.

They’re not that different, right.

Not that different at all. It’s just weird that you have to specifically mark something as female. so yes, Dominique is a very neutral character. So I was like, “Why don’t I just make the character completely neutral?”

I was also partly inspired by the game Echo Bazaar, it’s now called Fallen London, and one of the character selection options involved having a gender neutral character. So it’s like a person of mysterious and indistinct gender. I chose that as my character and as I was playing my character in this game I felt like oh, I really like this. I’m just playing kind of this sneaky, charming thief-type person and people keep going “Sir, uh, madam, uh, what…”

But that was part of the fun. I just thought that was really cool. I, myself, kind of identify as somewhat androgynous so there’s definitely a bit of personal inspiration there. Definitely in the last year or two, my personal sense of style has gotten a lot more androgynous and I really enjoyed embodying that and playing with people’s assumptions. It’s a more comfortable role for me to play. I was never always comfortable just being a full-on woman but I’ve never really felt like a man, either. So it’s inspired by personal and inspired by people’s reactions to my previous work. 

Tell us a little bit about this game and the claymation and all that. It’s taken about year to get this together?

Kind of, yeah. I’ve spent about a year, since maybe summer 2011 or so. I got started prototyping, creating and putting the materials together, making the puppets, and trying to make a set and seeing how that would look. and doing some art tests and gradually over the year. I built the preliminary game engine, I had the music um…

The music is fantastic, by the way. I love the way that plays out. 

Thank you! Yeah, so just getting the music to loop seamlessly for the most part, and getting the musical queueing to work in a way that I am more or less happy with. 

How did you put that together (besides with magic)? Was it a lot of manual tweaking or was it more programmatic?

Well, I sort of programmed a system based on counting the beats per measure, measures per loop, and I had this timer loop running, with every kick at a certain point, like, “now you can queue the music and now you can queue the action.”

What was the most challenging part of the claymation itself?

Well, it was figuring out basically what the best way to capture the characters and the background would be. I decided to create sprites like one normally would in a video game, instead of a traditional claymation movie where you shape every frame by every frame. It’s really, really time consuming. I wanted to make the best use of the interactive format as I could.

I looked into trying to create a green screen but the way I was getting my characters and the camera equipment I was using, which was admittedly quite cheap, it wound up being more cost effective to use a white background and kind of trace around in Photoshop and create the alpha channel that way. It was a slightly tedious process, but since I wound up doing a more simple animation style, cause I have kind of short-limbed characters, so they show they’re kind of moving a bit fast and stuff. It’s kind of like a herky-jerky silent film kind of feel. So I was able to maintain that, and that was kind of interesting. 

Did you study up on any claymation?

Oh yeah. I did a whole bunch of research on how people make claymation puppets and how they do armatures. The simplest way to do it is basically use aluminum wire and that’s what I did–use a skeleton and put the clay material around it. I used some silicone-based putty that cured but at the same time would also bend. So the wire would bend and the skin would move along with it. 

There isn’t a lot of deformation of the characters, right.

Yeah, it was cured material. If I were using plasticine, then there could have been more movement but at the same time a lot more potential for things to go wrong and to really deform and not being able to get it back to where it was. 

How much do you think your final product matches your initial vision? How much of a compromise did you get along the way?

Usually there’s always some kind of compromise especially when you’re a small indie developer. This was new art technique (for me). I tried to keep my expectations pretty open. I kept it to like, “Alright well, it’s not gonna look like Aardman or anything like that, but I’ll do the best I can.” I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

I wasn’t at the very start intending for it to be a black and white game, for instance. But when I was doing color tests and animation tests, I decided to try and see how it looked in black and white. The very very first game I did was also a back and white detective game and I thought I should try that again. Back to my roots! And the black and white style ended up looking really good for the art style, so I decided to keep it. So I saturated the colors a lot more so it really did feel like a silent film. 

A huge thanks to Deirdra for talking with us at GDC this year. We wish nothing but the best with Dominique Pamplemousse and any future endeavors, which–according to a blog entry–include working on an MFA in Santa Cruz, California.

$4.99

Dominique Pamplemousse in "It's All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!"

iPad Only App - Designed for the iPad
Released: 2013-04-01 :: Category: Games

Headphones are a funny thing. One listener’s sweet spot is another’s bass-heavy muddiness. The I-MEGO Throne headphones come in two flavors: Gold (bass heavy) and Poison (balanced clarity). I am reviewing the second model, which is a pretty purple linen underneath a silver-toned grille on each over-ear cup.

I prefer headphones that I can plug into my iPhone, use as a microphone, listen to music, and–of course–game with. To this end, the I-MEGO Throne Poison headset is ideal. These are by far the most comfortable headphones I’ve worn to date, with a soft, leather over-the-head band that never hurts, even after a couple of hours of use. Ditto the soft leather, sound-isolating ear cups, which only become uncomfortable after a long gaming session due to my upper ear piercings.

The clarity of the sound on these babies is something to experience. I dislike overly-bassy headphone like Beats as they tend to overpower the rest of the sound in the mid and high frequencies. Too high-frequency, however, leads to a tinny sound, and overly mid-range response makes things sound muddy. The I-MEGO Throne Poison headphones have an excellent, across-the-board clear sound, which makes all sorts of music delightful to listen to, including, acoustic, jazz, pop, and rock.

I was surprised by the excellent sound isolation properties of the headphones, as well. I took them on a plane recently, and figured I’d have to crank up the sound as I do with most other over-the-ear styles I’ve used. Not so, at all. I even left them on during the flight without music or games on, just to decrease the ambient noise of the jet engines. The music I listened to, Steve Martin’s banjo-tastic album, Rare Bird Alert, came through loud and clear, without having to crank up the iPhone volume beyond my usual loudness preference. These are fantastic headphones.

The only quibble I have is that the in-line mic only has one button, which lets me start and stop music playback, and answer and hand up the phone. There’s no way to use it to control volume or skip songs, like the Apple Earpods do. It’s a small thing, to be sure, but it would make an already great set of headphones even better. I also wish they came in a less “look at me” style, like a less ostentation solid black, or even white.

Bottom line, the I-MEGO Throne Poison headset is now my favorite set of phones to wear, in all sorts of settings where sound isolation and amazing clarity of sound is required. They’re well worth the price tag, and compete with much more expensive units that have a far less delightful audio response.

The Supertooth Disco Twin is a pair of great-sounding, rechargeable, stylish bluetooth speakers that connect to an iPhone or iPad with ease, allowing for full stereo sound. Each speaker alone is a fine mid-sized wireless speaker with a long battery life, but put two of them together and you have a portable sound powerhouse.

The Disco Twin speaker set is basically a pair of Disco II speakers, each weighing in at 16 watts of sound. Together, the pump out a stunning 32 watts of room-filling sound. It’s rare that you’ll find me turning a portable speaker down because it’s too loud, but these babies had me dialing it back on occasion.

The sound spectrum here is fairly good, with a solid if muffled bass response and decent mids and high range response. Audiophiles shouldn’t use portable Bluetooth speakers in the first place, but these do a fairly good job of sounding like more than a simple portable speaker, especially when separated and in full stereo.

Connecting these bad boys is a simple process, and there are great audio cues from each speaker to denote the on, off, and full stereo states. The left speaker is the master when connecting both, and when powered on, it says, “Left,” and then the right speaker says, “Right,” in a pleasant female voice. The speakers also say, “hello,” and “goodbye” when powering them on or off. It’s a nice touch.

The speakers come with a cloth bag for each separate unit, as well as a AC wall wart to charge the internal batteries. The battery life is relatively long when fully charged; I was able to listen to a full afternoon of music without draining them at a medium volume. The manufacturer promises 3 to 4 hours at high volume, and up to 10 on medium, and I’ve seen nothing to discount that.

The Disco Twin Bluetooth speakers are a delight to use separately or in concert as a full stereo portable speaker system, and they provide a decent sound quality and great volume for the price. I highly recommend them for those music lovers who want a bit more from a portable speaker.

If you’ve played Eve Online, you’ll feel right at home in Vendetta Online, an upcoming space-themed MMO for the iPad. It’s been out on Mac, PC, Linux, and Android for a while now, and is finally polished enough, according to founder and CEO, John Bergman, to make its debut on the iPad. Bergman sat down with us today in the last few hours of GDC to show off the gorgeous space sim, which includes guilds, a vast trading economy, and some fantastic space combat features. Keep your eyes on this game, as Bergman hopes to release it sometime this Spring.

One of the cool things about coming to GDC is seeing the upcoming games with a ton of potential even before they’re available in the App Store. Forge Reply Games, from Italy, showed off its in-production, early-alpha game based on the work of Joe Dever, the author of the successful series of young adult gamebook adventure novels (Lone Wolfin the 1980s. Dever is writing a new sgtory for this one, and it includes more than just reading and dice rolling, with puzzles to solve and turn-based combat in full 3D rounding out the package. Forge REply’s Alessandro Mazzega told us that they were looking for a publisher for the final push to finish and market the game, hopefully this year. Keep an eye on this one; we surely will.

Autodesk is a well-known software company that makes the programs that game designers and developers use to create the games you play and love, from indie hits to AAA console and PC titles. They’re taking a step closer to the consumer realm wiht the 123D series, notably 123Creatures, an app for iPad that lets you design a creature from the wireframe on up, letting you realize your designs in true 3D, which can then be sent to a 3D printing service from within the app itself. Cool stuff, really.

We stopped by the Neurosky booth today at GDC to learn more about the Neurosky brainwave interface, a light headset with a single sensor that rests on your forehead to pick up brainwaves. The current sensor can detect different states of mind, like meditation and attention, as well as facial gestures like blinks. The company is looking for more developers to use the technology for their apps and games. We got a short demo of a real toy helicopter ball (in the video below) and a game in which the player switches between two mind states to lift and then throw an in-game truck at his or her opponent.

Game Insight, a free-to-play game publisher, is launching Dragon Eternity, a fairly deep high-fantasy MMO to iOS today. The game should be live within the hour, and will be free to download. The time we spent with the game today showed us a game with depth and casual appeal, with cross-platform play built right in. We’ll get a review up soon, so stay tuned.

Roblox is an online sandbox game with the tools to let users create their own gaming worlds, complete with physics, weapons, and environments using consumer-level creation tools. There’s a website, too, which uses a youtube-like portal interface to help players publish their games easily, and find other games and worlds to play in. The iOS version is taking off, said CEO David Baszucki, and becoming a core part of the company strategy for cross-platform gaming, as all versions of the game have the same code base.

Sitting down with Christian Dickert of dreamfab ga(Chasing Yello) today was a delight, mostly because his company’s card battler, TriDek, isn’t hight fantasy themed. The conceit here is that the future brings gene-mod creatures to televised professional sports, letting you build decks and battle it out in a hybrid real-time and asynchronous card collecting battle game. Look for it to hit iOS and other mobile platforms soon.

Set some twenty years after the events of Ultima 4, Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar is a completely redesigned, fully realized MMO for your iOS device. Our time with the game at GDC this year showed an amazingly faithful full-on MMO on the iPad, something we haven’t seen to this day. The game should release in the next few months, and we’ll be keeping our beady little eye on it until then.

We had the rare honor of sitting down with Paul Trowe, one of the original Leisure Suit Larry producers, to talk about his upcoming iPad game, Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded, a remake of the original Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. The new title, set to release in the next few months, is a complete re-do of the title, with all new puzzle solutions, art, music (by Austin Wintory, no less), and writing.

The signature double and triple entendres are there, both in the actual dialogue and in the artwork. There are tons of Kickstarter backers created as characters in the game as well, making this truly a community-driven game.

Big Fish Games previewed their new match three game, Zombies Zombies Zombies, for us today. The mechanic actually works well, here, as you tap same-color zombies in triangle patterns to have your apocalypse survivors blow hem to smithereens. There are a ton of fun power-ups, and playing it was super easy to get into, and very satisfying to play. Look for it to come out this summer.

SEGA showed off a bunch of new games today at the Games Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. One promising iPad/Browser game, developed by Gogogic Games, is Godsrule: War of Mortals, a city-building, battling, real time combat game that’s playable on iPad and any desktop browser. We’re excited by the depth of strategy we saw, including character upgrades, real-time battles, and clan-based trading and resource production. This one should be out in the next couple of months.

Pangalore, the gaming studio behind Knightly Adventures, sat down with us today to share the new game, ZooVale. Built in HTML 5 for maximum compatibility, you’ll be able to play the game on desktop and mobile browsers, as well as your iPad, seamlessly across platforms and with friends. You’ll build a village, collect and breed animals, and battle your way in Adventure mode. It looks like great fun, and should be out in a couple of months.

Halfbrick (Jetpack Joyride) gave us an early look at its new Game Dev Story meets Rockband game, Band Stars. Choose a genre, band members, and lyrical topics to create hit songs and build your following. Train musicians, keep them well supplied with energy drinks, and you’ll have a dream team rockin’ in no time.

Pixowl Games (The Sandbox) showed us their next big game, Greedy Grub, a sandbox, city-building game awash in comic artist, Laurel Duermael’s whimsical and beautiful artwork. Look for this next big thing from the Pixowl folks in the next couple of months.

Josh Boggs of Australian gaming developer, Loveshack, showed us an early build of Framed, a beautifully designed puzzle cum comic-style storytelling game. We played through the first few episodes, moving animated panels around to change the outcome of the story in each level. The studio hopes to build the game out to a feature movie length in the coming months.

We sat down with Thomas Bleyer of Ravensburger, the veteran of board games both analog and digital, for a quick coffee meeting this morning. We took an early look at Las Vegas, a new game from the studio that involves dice and a frenetic pace. Check the VIne video below for a sneak peek, and be ready to check the full game out in a couple of months.

If you’ve played any of the Bloons TD games, you know how frantic–and downright fun–the tower defense with balloons and monkeys game can get. With the upcoming Bloons TD Battles, from the Ninja Kiwi/Digital Goldfish dream team, you’ll get to test your skills against real opponents on the same iPad or over the internet. Get ready, ’cause its gonna get insane.

Had a great chat with Dave Pottinger of BonusXP Games today at GDC, and he showed us an early build of his company’s new title, Caveman Smash. It looks adorable, and has quite a bit of depth to the strategy involved in each level. We’re looking forward to this one, for sure. Caveman Smash should come out within a month or two.

The iKit NuCharge is entering its final week of promotion on the Kickstarter website, and it’s already garnered twice the amount of its original funding goal. There’s a good reason for this, of course. The NuCharge is a well designed, light, slim battery case that can offer almost a full extra charge of the iPhone 5 battery case for a reasonable price.

Our review unit came with the battery module, a brushed aluminum face piece, and a slim clear plastic case that fits snugly on the iPHone 5, and to which the other pieces snap onto te back of. The Li-Ion Polymer battery pack is surprisingly light and thin, adding a small amount of thickness to the iPhone when snapped into place. The brushed aluminum face plate is attractive enough to use when the battery module is either charging or when I didn’t want the little bit of extra bulk. The battery pack is easily removed, though the aluminum face plate takes a bit of effort to slide off when attached.

The NuCharge has a fairly flimsy kickstand on the back, which works to hold the iPhone 5 in a landscape orientation. It’s functional, but doesn’t feel as solidly constructed as the rest of the unit. The battery module is charged at the bottom of the unit via an included micro USB cord.

Other battery cases I’ve used offer a pass-through charging system, which the NuCharge does not. It will not charge the iPhone while the battery pack itself is connected. This isn’t a deal-breaker, as the iPhone 5 lightning connector is accessible at the same time, allowing for a dual charge scenario.

Once the battery case is fully charged, it’s a simple matter of removing the recessed Lightning cable from the back of the battery unit and connecting it to the iPhone’s own Lightning port. The rubberized connector cable feels solid and rugged, ensuring regular use for a while to come. The NuCharge was able to bring my iPhone up from 10% or so up to 94% several times over many days, which is a respectable amount considering the low weight and profile of the entire unit.

The one issue that cropped up during a few of my charging tests was an odd disconnect of the charging system. I’d have the Lightning cable connected to the bottom of the unit. The cables felt solidly plugged in, but the unit didn’t charge the iPhone until I either re-plugged the cable in or fiddled with the charging button. It didn’t happen every time, but enough to be a concern. This was a pre-release unit, however, so here’s hoping the retail version won’t have this issue.

Ultimately, the combination of solid features make the NuCharge a fantastic bit of kit, giving iPhone 5 owners that extra full battery of charge for a competitive price. While it’d be great to have just a bit more charge in the module, the weight and slim profile more than make up for it.

The RockSteady XS is a portable, micro Bluetooth speaker designed for use with any audio source that supports the Bluetooth 3.0 protocol, including iPads, iPhones, and other mobile or computing devices. It also includes a audio port for a line in, and a full-sized USB port for audio in and device charging, as well. There are a host of buttons on the front of the unit, which can be used to play, pause, forward, or reverse playback with many audio apps, like Pandora, Music, or Rdio.

The design of this mini speaker is interesting, in that the main speakers face out the two sides of the unit, one on each end of the rectangular casing. There are also holes in the top of the speaker, as well. Overall, this gives the RockSteady XS a distinct advantage over other speakers I’ve tried, with a 100db loudness that belies the diminutive size of the device. There’s a good deal of volume that can be applied before things get distorted, as well. The sound itself is fairly well-balanced, with a tendency for a brittle, tinny sound without some EQ from the sound source, especially at higher volumes.

The speaker itself is made of aluminum, making it both tough and light. There’s a removable battery on the bottom, and you can purchase more from Killer Concepts, making this a great option for someone who needs longer than one battery’s worth of life. In my use of the RockSteady XS, I found the battery life to be similar to that of the other devices I’ve used with an afternoon’s worth of listening at loud volume, on average.

My one big issue with the RockSteady XS is the battery on/off toggle. When I forgot to turn the unit off, which happened more than I’d like to admit, the battery continued to drain while the speaker sat on my desk, or in my bag. There really ought to be an auto-off feature to prevent typical user error like this, though it is nice to be able to definitively know if you’ve turned the speaker off, as well.

Bottom line, the RockSteady XS is a loud micro Bluetooth speaker with an innovative, rugged design that should meet the needs of many a listening environment, from outdoor picnics to dorm parties or hotel rooms. The great utility of the device is a bit offset by the sometimes tinny sound quality and the easily-forgotten toggle switch, but is still a great value considering the removable battery, the 100db sound volume, and the ability to charge a device from the back of the unit.