Editor with the 148Apps Network since August 5, 2010
Dad, Mac Head, Gamer. Rob lives in Anchorage, AK, and commutes daily to the intarwebs to edit and write about games and gaming. His previous incarnation was as the Executive Editor at The Portable Gamer, and brings that experience with a good dose of humility into his current tasks at 148Apps.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 31st, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
The folks (Electronic Arts) behind The Simpsons: Tapped Out must have love on their minds, as they’ve just updated their free, universal app with new stuff for Valentine’s Day. Decorate Springfield with limited-time decorations, collect Hearts from around town, and send Valentines greetings to your friends.
• New Buildings – Pick up some love handles a la mode at Phineas Q. Butterfat’s, capitalize on insecure relationships at Howard’s Flowers, and even lose some golf balls at Sir Putt-A-Lots.
• New Characters – Send Shauna around searching for young love, get Homer and Marge to snuggle in the Golf Castle, and send Valentines with Lisa.
• New Decorations – Sweeten up your Springfield with rose bushes, cherub topiaries, and the “I Choo-Choo-Choose You Train.”
• New Quests – Join Bart on his quest for love. Will Bart and Shauna enjoy a blossoming romance, or will Bart be left sulking in his room?
• New Event – Visit your friends’ towns, send Valentine’s Day cards, and generate limited-time Heart currency.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 31st, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Universal app, Minecraft – Pocket Edition, got a new update today, bringing new crafting joy to the diminutive version of one of the most popular games on any platform, including baby animals, signs, armor, fancy clouds, and more. If you haven’t grabbed it already, head over to the App Store now and do so, because baby animals!
Version 0.6.0
- Baby animals
- Signs
- Armor
- Fancy Clouds
- Sand and gravel have gravity
- Improved D-pad
- Lots of new blocks
Known bugs (fixed for next version)
- Falling sand can disappear
- When returning from Home-screen, sign model disappear
- Screenshots in store are old. Will put up new ones
Seriously, the folks at Imangi have to be in a state of shock. They’ve just reported that Temple Run 2, the sequel to their hit game, Temple Run, has hit 50 million downloads in just 13 days. That’s a ton more than Angry Birds, which previously held the record as fastest growing mobile game, with 50 million downloads in 35 days.
Congrats to the team at Imangi Studios; we’re super happy for you all.
“Temple Run has evolved into something so much bigger than us,” says Keith Shepherd, co-founder of Imangi. “The game has performed beyond our wildest dreams, and we are thrilled that gamers and fans have embraced Temple Run 2 in such a short period of time.”
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 31st, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Swampy just keeps getting better, as Disney’s Where’s My Water updates yet again with a new Photo Finish feature that lets you take a quick picture of your winningest levels and share them out on your social networks. Add that to the already amazing three story, 400 level, $0.99 game, and you’ve got a win. Take a picture!
Introducing a brand new feature – Photo Finish! Photo Finish records how YOU beat a Level of the Week, and then gives you an awesome picture of your work to share with your friends. Bonus challenge – can you beat the level and draw something fun? For the month of February, we have also added special Levels of the Week inspired by Aulani, a Disney Resort & Spa! Check them out now!
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 31st, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
The Voxel Agents, developer of the Train Conductor series, is back with a brand new game featuring nothing less than a block sliding puzzle. Puzzle Retreat wants you to chill, man.
Shut off the outside world. Relax, unwind and focus with a new type of puzzle that is both simple to learn and compellingly deep.
Taking inspiration from Sudoku and Sokoban, Puzzle Retreat is a fresh challenge that will have you losing track of time and forgetting about the outside world.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 31st, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
SlotZ Racer 2 is the sequel to developer Strange Flavour’s popular slot car racing game, SlotZ Racer. There are 25 different vehicles in this one, along with 31 tracks to race around, plus a track editor to create, share, and race on.
SlotZ Racer 2 has been completely re-written by Strange Flavour (creators of Flick Fishing, SlotZ Racer, Warpack: Grunts) and is released under their own label as a free game. Fans of the original can upgrade and play the new version whilst new players can jump in straight away and get racing!
Players with the original SlotZ Racer on their iOS device get a special bonus! If SlotZ Racer 2 detects the original version of the game, among other things, a unique car is unlocked, just for being brilliant
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 30th, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
THX tune-up is a new app from the folks behind modern-day cinematic sound, THX, which hopes to help you calibrate your HDTV to its best visual and aural settings. Connect your iPhone 4 or iPad 2 and up to your TV with an HDMI cable or AppleTV/AirPlay and point the camera at your screen to have THX tune-up help you get the best of each.
THX tune-up features custom video test patterns, carefully selected photos and tutorials to help you adjust and confirm the best picture settings on your display based on your room lighting. Using special test sounds, THX tune-up also lets you check your external speakers to make sure they are working in phase and are connected properly for 2-channel stereo or 5.1 surround sound systems.
THX tune-up is completely interactive and you will be able to go through it at your own pace and in any order. Use your iPad 2 (or later) or iPhone 4 (or later) to connect to your display or sound system with an AppleTM Digital AV Adapter and HDMI cable or through a wireless Apple TV.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 30th, 2013 iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad
Shared Photo Streams are great, but they’re fairly limited in what you can do with them. Enter PhotoSocial, a new private photo sharing app that aims to put Photo Streams out to pasture.
● Send entire days of photos over text/email instantly via private web link. No login, no download, no hassle – viewable on any smart-phone or desktop. (Your friends do NOT need PhotoSocial to view photos you send.)
● Have friends with PhotoSocial? Send photos directly to their gallery, receive photos back directly into yours.
● Like & comment on photos in private! To use, just pick friends you were with on that day, choose photos to send, and your photos become interactive between just the friends who were there. PhotoSocial brings your gallery to life!
● Uses geo-tag data in your photos to know when you and friends were together, notifies you when you have photos to exchange. (Optional, enabled only with your precise consent.)
● Sharing has never been this easy. Skip other tools that only do half of the job. PhotoSocial is your complete tool for your personal photo collection.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 30th, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Steve Jackson and Tin Man Games have released another interactive gamebook adventure, Fighting Fantasy: Hounds of Hell, to the app store today. Make sure you win by choosing the right path, getting the right gear, avoiding dangerous traps, and surviving combat.
• Make the gamebook as easy or hard as you like and even turn on a special cheat mode to read it old-school!
• Atmospheric new visuals which can be turned off to make the gamebook look like it came off the printing press in the 80s!
• Tim Sell’s classic illustrations colorised for the app, making full use of the high-resolution retina displays.
• Ian Miller’s famous cover animated and brought to life.
• Fantastic new cover artwork to unlock!
• Achievements to find throughout the gamebook with full Game Center connectivity.
Looks like the developer of Overkill, Craneballs, has been busy, creating a sequel to the original target shooter with a multiplayer twist. The teaser trailer for Overkill 2 is up and it’s looking pretty good, what with all the crazy guns involved. The game should be available on the App Store and Google Play in March of this year.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 29th, 2013 iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad
Super Squawk Software just made its terrific tower defense game, The Creeps!, free in both iPhone and iPad editions. Our reviewer called it a “Grade-A tower defense” game, and gave it four and a half stars, so be sure to check it out as soon as possible!
What do you get for that amazing price? Well, here you go:
* 11 FREE levels (Variety of themes)
* 7 FREE Thanksgiving themed levels!
* 7 FREE 4th of July themed levels!
* 30 Levels with three different level themes and three different game modes
* 5 FREE Bonus levels – Each level shows off a new premium theme (Dinosaur, Battery, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Easter!).
* Game Center support! Online leader boards and 60 Achievements!
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 29th, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
FIFA 13, EA’s latest soccer game, garnered four and a half stars from our reviewer when it released. Now, the company has updated the game to include more “off the pitch” features, including the following:
• Build and manage your own team of the best players on earth.
• Trade and sign new players to enhance team chemistry and boost performance.
• Manage player fitness and morale to reap extra rewards.
• Play free – or purchase packs with over 10,000 real-life superstars.
• Improve players’ stats as their real-life performances heat up on the world stage of football.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 29th, 2013 iPad Only App - Designed for iPad
Stratego, the classic board game of military strategy, is available now from Jumbo, the manufacturer of the original board game (it was licensed by Milton Bradly for distribution in the US in 1961).
You can have it on your iPad, now, though, for $6.99 in the App Store.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 28th, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Speed reading app, Fastr, promises to help you read, well, faster, with its unique training method. Usually $5.99, it’s on sale for free today, but only for a limited time. Get it, umm, fast!
Learning how to read faster – sounds like a hard work, isn’t it? What if you could train your reading skills while reading your favourite book or print article – wouldn’t that be nice? This is what we have achieved with Fastr RSVP reader application. No matter, what’s your reading skills are, we created a solution that works. You can now be training while reading your favorite books that are interesting and appealing to you. Fastr turns reading skills training into a fun and pleasant process and we welcome you to be part of it!
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 28th, 2013 iPad Only App - Designed for iPad
Mushroom Wars, the PSN hit that’s now on the iPad, is available for today only on the App Store for a tiny $0.99 price. Be sure to grab it now, while it’s so cheap!
About Siege Hero
• Use fire, rocks, oil and many other destructive means to destroy structures of all shapes and sizes.
• A grand total of 324 levels of castle-crashing action. Countless hours of gameplay!
• Slick, visceral gameplay that will satisfy your inner rage. For now…
• Four unique areas: Age of Discovery, Age of Pirates, Age of Cowboys and Age of Heroes
• Rich retina graphics for realistic exploding ships and crumbling castles
• Battle Samurais, Vikings, Knights and cowboys as you lay waste to their fortresses
• Regular updates and level packs planned by the Siege Hero team
• FREE on iPhone for a limited time only!
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 25th, 2013 iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad
Originally published by Konami, Gesundheit! is now available for free from its original developer, Revolutionary Concepts. If you missed it the first time around, this might be the time to grab it in case it goes away again. It’s available in an iPhone version, with support for iPhone 5 and Retina display, as well as an iPad HD version. Both free!
He’s back! The multi-award winning ‘little Pig that could’ returns to iOS and is FREE for the first (and probably last) time ever! Apples “App of The Week” with no coins to buy or annoying adverts just a one-time chance for everyone to grab one of the highest rated adventure puzzle games of all time!
Featured Best of 2011 by Apple and loved by reviewers and gamers the world over, Gesundheit! combines extraordinary hand-drawn visuals and animation with an infectious gameplay to create a vibrant and colorful world where cute characters face off against wacky monsters, pigs will fly, and snot happens!?
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 25th, 2013 iPad Only App - Designed for iPad
If you haven’t gotten the chance to play this fantastic RTS game on the PlayStation 3, you need to stop reading this, right now, and grab it from the App Store. Seriously, it’s one of my favorite games to play. We’ll have a full review soon, but for now, enjoy the video above.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 24th, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
In what may be the most unique mash-up we’ve heard of in the mobile gaming space, Red Robot Labs (Life is Magic) and Supermono Studios (MiniSquadron, Epic Win) have come together to mix together location-based gaming with an arcade-style overlay. Wild!
Help Columbus the Cat to free caged animals all over the world before he is captured by the dastardly evil scientists.
A revolutionary arcade action location game free of simply ‘checking in’ to places.
Over 1 million playable levels across the globe!
Open Portals to move around 19 different cities across the world to enjoy truly open location based gaming.
Visit the locations of real life landmarks such as the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, the London Eye and more!
Be the official King or Queen of your street with high-score leaderboards for every playable level.
The original and best Arcade Location game for iOS!
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 24th, 2013 iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad
When I wanted to make my daughter’s Animal Muppet head costume, I headed straight to Instructables, an amazing website with tons of instructions and how-to tutorials on just about anything to do it yourself. Now, there’s an app for your iOS device, letting you carry this amazing resource around with you.
From useful and entertaining how-tos and hacks, to delicious recipes and outrageous inventions, Instructables is the place to explore, document, and share your creations.
With over 100k tutorials in technology, workshop, living, and more, we have the largest collection of do-it-yourself projects created by others just like you.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 24th, 2013 iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad
Recently acquired by Twitter, Vine is a new app that aims to bring short video clips to its own social network, with users, followers, and the like, just like another popular service, Instagram.
• Unlimited uploads and free
• Instantly post videos on Vine, then share to Twitter and Facebook (more coming soon!)
• Find, follow, and interact with people close to you
• Explore trending posts, featured hashtags and editor’s picks
Build-your-own-game site, Roblox, is calling its universal app on iOS as a major factor in the continued growth seen in its gaming community in the last year. Roblox for the iPhone and iPad allows kids to connect to and play in any user-created games built with the Roblox system.
ROBLOX’s accelerated growth in 2012 is complemented by the popularity of its recently released ROBLOX Mobile app, where users play ROBLOX on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. The app is available in the iTunes store for free and brings a substantial subset of the ROBLOX desktop experience to mobile, including the ability to discover and play user-created levels, browse user-built models, and purchase user-crafted avatar clothing. Since July, there have been more than 250,000 downloads of the mobile app; in December, more than a third of all ROBLOX Mobile users played at least 10 times, turning ROBLOX into a mobile habit.
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 23rd, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Created by 12-year-old Eric Zeiberg for his sister who has autism, HandySpeech converts handwriting in any one of 13 languages into speech, allowing folks without a voice to communicate simply by writing what they want to say down.
As an assisted speech technology application, HandySpeech supplements or even replaces speech for people with spoken language difficulties. The application helps people with speech or language impairments, including autism, stuttering, stroke, muscular dystrophy, oral, throat and neck cancer, and others.
BulkyPix, developer of games like The Sandbox and Little Amazon, announced today another in-house produced game, Redneck Revenge: A Zombie Road Trip.
It’s the end of another day for our good ol’ Redneck. But just as he’s starting to close the bar, strange customers start coming in through the door! Damned! Zombies!
Enjoy all the madcap fun with this cartoon-style 2D shoot ‘em up.
Carry out your investigation and find out where all the zombies are coming from. Armed to the teeth, get ready to fend off these undead partygoers…
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 22nd, 2013 iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad
Check out G5 Entertainment’s hidden object game, Treasure Seekers: Visions of Gold on the App Store, as it’s on sale for $0.99 (iPhone) and $1.99 (iPad). There are more than 40 levels of hidden object action with 19 puzzles to put your brain to work with, so give it a look today!
Join Nelly and her younger brother as they unravel family secrets and face breathtaking adventure! Nelly has dreamed of finding the hidden treasure that her grandmother, who was a pirate, hid long ago. When Nelly’s parents leave her and her brother Tommy at home for a day, Tommy suddenly goes missing. Solving this strange disappearance is the first step, eventually leading Nelly and her brother to an ancient treasure map! Test your skills with challenging puzzles that will take you from strange laboratories to the dangerous depths of the ocean. With its charming characters, engaging storyline and plethora of puzzles, this game is an irresistible hidden object/adventure hit!
Posted January 22nd, 2013 by Rob LeFebvre Our Rating: :: GROWS ON YOU
Growtopia takes the now-familiar mining and crafting genre, and turns it into a massively multiplayer grow-your-own-stuff game that unfortunately allows for, and maybe even encourages, griefing and scamming.
Looks like the amazing folks at Imangi Studios have another certified hit on their hands, as their just-released Temple Run 2 hits the 20 million download mark after only one weekend on the iOS App Store. The game hit the number one spot on the free app list a mere eight hours after it released, and is the number three top grossing app as of this writing. This sequel to mega-hit Temple Run, itself downloaded over 170 million times, is sure to continue its run across the top lists for some time to come. Temple Run 2 has pulled in over 210 million sessions, which Imangi Studios says brings the total time in-game to over 1,775 years of gameplay. Wow.
“The response from fans has been overwhelming,” says Keith Shepherd, co-founder of Imangi. “We are thrilled players want more of the Temple Run universe, and we hope to grow and expand the game over the coming months.”
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 18th, 2013 iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad
Strategy RPG gamers rejoice, as Hunters: Episode One is going free for a limited time, and Hunters 2 is reduced in price from $4.99 to $0.99. If you haven’t given these a try, we suggest you do so right now, before the price goes back up!
Hunters 2 has all the strategic fun of Episode One, plus:
New to Hunters 2:
- Single player campaign mode
- 100′s of new weapons and armor options
- New environments
- New enemy types
- A crafting system that allows you to manufacture custom items
- Optional permanent deaths mode
- Universal App
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 18th, 2013 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Hockey superfan? This is your app, available for iPhone and iPad as a universal app. Here’s what you get:
- Live Scores and Stats for Every Team and Player
- Live Game Simulation with Near Real-Time Shift Changes, Boxscore, and Play-by-Play
- Post-Game Video Highlights
- Video on Demand Content Including Videos from your Favorite Teams and the Best Selections from NHL Editors
- Full Season Schedule and Standings
- Customized Game Alerts
- Player Profiles with Headshots, Bios and Stats for all Active NHL Players
- Customize up to 5 Favorite Teams
You can also upgrade to a Premium account for $4.99, and get
- Live Radio Broadcasts (home and away)
- In-Game Video Highlights
- Condensed Game Replays
Posted by Rob LeFebvre on January 18th, 2013 iPhone App - Designed for iPhone, compatible with iPad
For those of us in the US, it’s that time again: taxes! TurboTax, one of the leading online and software-based tax services, has just released SnapTax, which lets you snap a picture of your W9, and submit it via the app, all for a $24.99 fee. If you have simple taxes, this might be the app for you.
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:: GROWS ON YOU
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