"If there is an app for that"

Recontroller review

February 22, 2024 by RSS Feed

Style over substance can only get you so far, but it works out quite well if you're only going on a short journey. Recontroller does exactly that. In addition to being a sort of visual mind-trip, this game doesn't ask much of you in return but to relax and enjoy its wild aesthetic, and it ends right about when you might expect to get tired of it.

Shoot and spin

Recontroller is a wave-based arena shooter where you play as a pixelated person who is endlessly rotating in a void. To begin the game, you tap to launch a wave and then use one side of the screen to move your avatar around and hold down on the other to shoot. The goal of every wave is to make it through alive, which means not getting hit by an enemy twice within what is usually around a minute-long period.

As you kill enemies and advance through waves, your character levels up, which generally means that the amount of projectiles that fly out of your character when you fire increases. Everything progresses this way through 15 or so levels, including three bosses, before you reach the game's end.

Supported by style

This might all sound almost boringly straightforward, and that's because in a lot of ways it is. The thing that makes Recontroller stand out is how its action looks. With some heavy filtering, use of 2D and 3D graphics, and clever visual design choices, Recontroller is a visually chaotic gameplay experience that can be overwhelming but also somehow still legible and easy to play.

Tons of enemies may rush onto the screen, but you always know where to expect them from following the neon trails that signal their arrival. Your projectiles are a dull gray which reduces the amount of visual clutter as they bash against the brightly colored enemies to kill them. And all the while, you can see what wave you are on, how much health you have, and how much time you have left to survive by looking into the abyss you are floating through, as that information is repeated infinitely into the background.

Easy trip

No matter your skill level, you can pretty easily complete Recontroller in a sitting or two. Not only is the shooting gameplay somewhat easy, but also leveling up is a permanent upgrade that follows you between deaths. So, if you find yourself dying a few times on a particular level, it is only a matter of time until you level up to the point that all the enemies die faster so you can move onto the next wave.

Recontroller is also not especially deep, but considering it is a free game that asks very little of you, these qualities all end up complimenting each other. I couldn't see enjoying a version of this game that tried to be more punishing or--worse--much longer than it already is. It's just a short and sweet exploration of a somewhat trippy aesthetic and then it's done.

The bottom line

There's not a whole lot to Recontroller besides being a chill visual spectacle. That said, it accomplishes this simple task without wasting your time or asking you to spend money. Seems like a fair trade to me.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/recontroller-review/

Of Two Minds review

February 20, 2024 by RSS Feed

I wouldn't say there's been a whole lot of expermientation that I've seen around reinventing FMV games, which are also commonly referred to as interactive movies or games that use video clips as its main way of presenting the experience.Sam Barlow's output is probably the most "out there" the genre has gotten, and Of Two Minds more or less takes after his approach to nonlinear clip-hunting. Unfortunately for Of Two Minds, though, the most compelling thing about the game is how the clips in the game even exist, which is something you can find out about very easily without having to slog through its pretty bizarre and overwrought storytelling.

Analyze this movie

Of Two Minds tells the story of a few different characters, all of whom have some ties to the practice of psychoanalysis in the 1980s. Some are analysts, some are analysands, some are both, and some are neither. The core of the story follows one character in particular (a woman named Annie) as she uncovers some repressed memories over the course of initiating and juggling several adulterous affairs.

You don't really know much of this at first, as the game's opening segment is just a minute long clip of two characters talking to each other vaguely about needing to tell each other something, which opens up the game structure of using psychoanalysis terminology to sift through hundreds of clips that eventually tell a barely cohesive narrative.

Teaching and tapping

Of Two Minds has players discover disjointed clips that eventually tell its full story by having keywords appear on video clips that players tap on to add to a notebook. Once the clip is over, you then can tap on various keywords to combine them into a search, which unlocks one or more video clips that contain those keywords.

You repeat this process ad nauseam while the game pops up to tell you about the keywords any time you encounter new ones for the first time. Most of these keywords are psychoanalysis jargon like countertransference and the aforementioned analysand, but others are more visual and conceptual motifs like colors, recurring objects, and time. In any case, it all feels somewhat arbitrary, because the most efficient way to play Of Two Minds is to tap every keyword that pops up to maximize your number of search terms after any given clip or set of clips.

Unconscious expectations

Beyond gameplay that feels completely rote and somewhat unnecessary, Of Two Minds just doesn't tell a very compelling story. Aspects of it are interesting, for sure, but the dialog in this game barely makes sense. Characters interact with each other like they are aliens who have never heard human conversation before. The vast majority of lines are extremely vague and almost all read as breadcrumbs for the viewer as opposed to something someone is trying to convey to the person they are interacting with.

Once you've reached a certain number of clips unlocked, you unlock "Case Studies" which summarize narrative arcs of each character, and only then does the stated intent behind the story start to emerge, though these explanations also reveal that the kind of story it is trying to tell is so bogged down by different meanings and threads that you can't really make much of it without someone making a concerted effort to try and explain it to you directly. All that said, I was somewhat compelled and fascinated by the clips themselves, as they were so remarkably dated as 80s footage that I wanted to see more. I spent a lot of my time while playing wondering how it was made or where these clips were taken from. As it turns out, Of Two Minds looks like an 80s movie because it--in fact--was an abandoned film shot from that time period that has been remade into this game.

The bottom line

In the end, Of Two Minds feels more like an attempt to teach players about psychoanalysis and film analysis as opposed to being an entertaining game or story, though it isn't particularly effective at being any of those things. It is most compelling as a cultural artifact, though being able to enjoy its odd 80s footage is not a particularly fun or efficient exercise.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/of-two-minds-review/

Resident Evil 4 review

February 14, 2024 by RSS Feed

This review of Resident Evil 4 coming out quite a bit after its release for a very specific reason, which I'll try to articulate as best I can in this piece. The original Resident Evil 4 is a modern classic that essentially raised the bar and reinvented the way 3rd-person action games are made. The game that came to iOS is a remake of this classic, but it also just isn't really that game. It works fine enough on iOS (if you treat your device like a miniature, less capable console), but so many things have been shoved into this remake that it's an unwieldy, bloated, and generic shadow of the game it is supposed to be honoring.

Save the president's daughter

In case you haven't played some version of Resident Evil 4 before, this game takes place on a remote island and follows Leon S. Kennedy as he searches for the president's daughter, who has been kidnapped. Things on this island immediately go sideways and Leon finds himself (once again) facing off against hordes of zombie-like people and other creatures that have been infected with a parasite referred to as "las plagas."

Throughout the game, you pilot Leon as he explores this island and has to fight and scavenge his way through all kinds of places on this island to complete the rescue mission. All of the action plays out over Leon's shoulder and it generally rotates between three different kinds of setpieces: puzzle-solving, open-ended combat, and boss fights.

Infected with new stuff

This version of Resident Evil 4 starts off faithfully enough to the original. Outside of a graphical update, the only new thing you might notice about the opening hour or so are some changes to the combat model that make it less fun, like a durability system for your combat knife and a plain reticle for your weapon as opposed to the iconic laser sight.

The further you get into the game, though, things really get off the rails. Resident Evil 4 has all these new side missions, more weapon types than you can reasonably manage, a system for collecting treasures and slotting gems into them, a shooting gallery mini-game, and--perhaps most importantly--large swaths of story and core gameplay that are just entirely new.

Just play the hits

I could see a situation where the team remaking Resident Evil 4 re-writes or changes the way certain segments of the original game play out as a way to get a do-over on something that maybe could be improved by new best practices or technical know-how, but not much of this new Resident Evil 4 feels like that. Instead, they just feel like changes for changes' sake, and there are so many of them that the game feels like it takes forever to get through.

The irony of this is that this remade Resident Evil 4 doesn't take that much longer than the original to complete. It just feels that way because there is so much tacked-on extra stuff that mostly doesn't feel meaningful, including random setpieces that feel completely detached from what is happening in the story. So, though the feel of tension and gunplay is all well and good, the whole experience ends up feeling like an exercise in mastering these mechanics without really invoking much of the nostalgia or good feelings associated with the original game.

The bottom line

Resident Evil 4 is barely a remake, and in straying so far from its source material it just feels kind of generic. It could have easily just been called "The Leon Chronicles: Las Plagas" or something. Yes, it's impressive that it runs as well as it does on iOS, and, yes, it's cool to see major releases like this come to the platform, but as a re-release of one of the most influential games of the millenium, it pretty much fails.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/resident-evil-4-review/

Free Apps to Download TODAY ONLY 02/13/2024

February 13, 2024 by RSS Feed

Sudoku Express , Fit Beats－EDM Beat Music game , Wiggly Bomb and more

Sudoku Express ( $2.99 → Free ) Pheinex, LLC Sudoku Express includes 1,001 unique puzzles waiting to be solved. Customize the color theme, font selection, and choose between easy, medium, and hard puzzles. The app will keep you entertained for days. There is a hint feature that you can use any time you get stuck.

Fit Beats－EDM Beat Music game ( $1.99 → Free ) Digital Hole Pvt. Ltd. Engage in some Tetris-like action with Fit Beats. Tap left or right to rotate and match the shapes. You can kick back and enjoy fun tunes while trying to beat your high score.

Wiggly Bomb ( $1.99 → Free ) Digital Hole Pvt. Ltd. Tap to change the direction our your bomb to avoid being blasted. The goal is to collect as many coins as you can without blowing up. See if you have what it takes to climb to the top of the leaderboards.

Calcvier - Keyboard Calculator ( $2.99 → Free ) Sergei Shpygar The days of switching between apps to calculate are over. Calcvier puts a calculator right into your keyboard. It includes all basic operations as well as the ability to save expressions. A dark theme is available as well.

Source link: http://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free

Free Apps to Download TODAY ONLY 02/12/2024

February 12, 2024 by RSS Feed

LUCH: Photo Effects & Filters , Clumsy Bomb , Resize Picture and more

iPhone:

Verylong: Screenshot Montage ( $2.99 → Free ) Dehui Chengzhen Verylong: Screenshot Montage allows you to grab extra long screenshots. After you install the app pull down on the control center on your device, long-press the screen recording button, navigate and choose which pages you want to capture, and let the app seamlessly generate one long screenshot. It might take a couple tries to get the hang out it, but once you do it works like a charm.

LUCH: Photo Effects & Filters ( $0.99 → Free ) Dmitry Mashkin This photography app gives images the effect of film photography. Luch lets you apply noise and dust effects, light leaks, bokeh and prism effects, and much more. Take full control over your image by using more than 20 handmade filters and 90 different effects. Images can be sized for an Instagram reel or story or for other social media networks.

Clumsy Bomb ( $1.99 → Free ) Digital Hole Pvt. Ltd. Tap the little bomb who loves to bounce to survive as long as possible. The faster you tap the higher you’ll go. Be careful not to hit the spikes as you bounce back and forth.

Resize Picture ( $0.99 → Free ) Le Giang Nam Resizer is a powerful app that lets you quickly resize and compress multiple photos at once. You’re able to rotate, flip, and crop photos right from the app. It allows you to print multiple photos to actual size, saving you both time and paper. You can also convert your photos to compatible formats such as JPEG, PNG, and HEIC and share to any device.

Speech Audio transcription ( $4.99 → Free ) Younes Oubari Speech Audio Transcription converts spoken words into text quickly and accurately. Whether you’re in a meeting, conducting interviews, or simply turning voice memos into readable content, this app does it all. The app offers live transcription, dictation to text, and voice to text. You can keep everything organized by adding labels to transcriptions.

Source link: http://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free