Pocket God

I love Bolt Creative's Pocket God. It is one of my favorite iPhone apps these days. At $0.99 (at least for the moment), it's not horribly painful. The price is supposed to go up in another week or so with the last planned update to the game.

As the title implies, you control the lives of the natives on two islands on your iPhone. You can be a benign God and give them food and try to keep them from dying. Or you can be like me: a quirky, wrathful God.

Once you accept your inner wrath, you can wipe out the little islanders in new and exciting ways: zap them with lightning, whip up a storm and blow them out to sea, fling them into the ocean, sacrifice them into a volcano, cause a volcano to erupt, turn one of them into a vampire who will kill the others, bring the sun to fry a vampire, feed them to sharks, cause an earthquake, watch them explode because they're unable to use the bathroom, or summon a T-Rex to eat them.

As an added bonus, you can name the islanders with that same names as people that have annoyed you and live out some vicarious voodoo doll fun.

The animation is a little cutesy, but my niece, my nephew and my friends' kids can't wait to get their hands on it again to live out some of their little kid homicidal rage -- just like me. I can't wait to see what the guys at Bolt come up with next.

Vampire Live! and Ninjas

One of the banes of my existence are those ubiquitous Facebook app requests for the Zynga games. Now the damned things have migrated to the iPhone.

Luckily, because of the way they've done it, I shouldn't be getting clan requests from all of my friends using iPhones or iPod Touches. Using things like Apperian or other third party libraries, there's the possibility of sharing information for these apps from one platform to another, whether it be Facebook, Android, Blackberry or iPhone. That's not what they did with Vampires Live, the free app for the iPhone.

All the time that you spent building up your character on Facebook? Gone.

If for no other reason than that, I don't see a lot of people switching platforms to play this. And for that shortsightedness, I thank the developers.

The game play is fairly similar to what I'd seen before with the Facebook app. You perform missions, raise your pool of wealth, increase your level and stats, buy abilities that will help your character grow.  It also doesn't really add anything new other than a way to play in the palm of your hand.

The biggest problem is that it needs Internet connectivity to do anything, because it is tightly coupled with the web site that powers it.

The second game that I'm reviewing, Ninjas, is a similar type of game. It has better graphics, but it is also tightly coupled to its web site.

Game play is similar: missions, wealth, abilities, weapons, character growth and advancement.

If these are the sorts of games that you enjoy, you'll like both of these.

Annoy-A-Teen Lite

CJKApps have given us something annoying, but possibly useful. They offer Annoy-A-Teen for $0.99 or Annoy-A-Teen Lite for free.

These products work largely on the same principle as the Mosquito in the UK: a high pitched noise that can usually be heard by those under 25, but not those of us that are above it.

I couldn't really hear anything myself, as you can probably imagine from my previous copping to impending decrepitude. Happily, some of my friends have kids, so I could test things on them.

The adults largely heard nothing, though a couple of women seemed to have exceptional hearing and heard the noise. Those that heard it reported that it was annoying as all hell, sort of like the hum of a fluorescent bulb at its most annoying. Though one person said that it was was worse than a dentist drill and complained of a headache afterwards.

Other than possibly using this to give myself some space on the bus after school lets out, when roughhousing kids make the ride annoying as hell, I don't really see much use for this app.

Yo Mama - Chris Chang

As I said before, there's a lot of duplication on the iPhone app store. For example, Yo Mama apps have a handful. Being fairly childish myself, I love stupid jokes, so I'll probably do my best to work through all of them here on this site.

The first is Chris Chang's Yo Mama app. It's simple, clear and at least to me, hilarious. Thinking about the behind the scenes work that had to go into this, it's fairly simple. So what makes this stand out is the crisp look and feel.

I look forward to seeing other apps by this developer and to see more Yo Mama joke apps.

Hear Planet

Hear Planet defines itself as an audio tour guide in your pocket. As someone that tends to shell out for audio tours and tour books, when I go to new museums—I'm clearly their gadget loving audience.

And I have to say I'm impressed. They tie the location services of the iPhone into a geo database on their site and deliver blurbs of information from Wikipedia and other sources.

The delivery is a bit dry as it comes from a computer synthesized rather than an actual human being, but that isn't a game stopper.

The wealth of information at your finger tips with this app is absolutely staggering. As someone with friends with vision issues, I can see this as the beginning of something that can really change things.

But even with what they have today, this is a really impressive app.

Whrrl v2.0

Whrrl is another social media application for the iPhone. I realize that everyone wants to be the next twitter, facebook or whatever else is hot that I haven't caught up with yet, but one question that comes to mind is whether it's needed.

Whrrl is beautifully laid out, clear and concise. Your messages are defined as 'stories' that include locations, characters and I'm sure if you do it right a blend of snark and pathos.

Even better, this app uses all facets of the iPhone: voice, pictures, and texting the palm of your hand.

My biggest critique is that Whrrl doesn't really seem to work with other phones as well. But that's more issues with web site, rather than the app.

The app is clear and straight forward, well laid out and intuitive.

Crate Maze Lite

Crate Maze Lite is Jacob Conn's new app available on the iPhone App store in lite (free), standard ($0.99) and pro ($2.99) versions. This is a review of the free version.

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."  Sadly, it is also a sign that people don't check the app store to see if something much better already exists.

Crate Maze's plot is simple enough. Use the controls: left, right, up, down and undo to move your truck through the maze, moving crates onto the designated locations marked by stars. As the vehicle moves, the game serenades you with a calming dental drill-esque whir.

The interface, though serviceable, is woefully inadequate to anyone that had seen this done much better in GTSystem Software's Naboko. (There the interface is clearer, select box and then select target location. Things move.)

I don't begrudge Mr. Conn making a game or his plan to release new levels monthly for the pro version. I just hate seeing inferior duplicates. I'd like to see more new or innovative programs.