It doesn’t take an esteemed leader in alternative medicine to convince people that Yoga is helpful for many things, such as weight loss, relaxation, general fitness and health. But, it’s not always easy to fit a yoga class into your schedule, and unless you have a Yoga for the People studio nearby, there’s usually a hefty fee to pay before embarking on your physical and mental wellbeing (try upwards of $13 per class in the Bay Area).  To assist you in those times when you’d like a studio session, but cannot, for one reason or another, be present in one, Authentic Yoga acts like a personalized collection of yoga videos. It can serve as both an introduction to yoga for the beginner or as a convenient tool to help the busy person enjoy something resembling a class, without actually having to attend one. Those who travel frequently will appreciate the flexibility and professionalism of this app, and I definitely consider it my go-to yoga app from now on.

Dr. Chopra is featured in several videos in the Understand Yoga section. In these, Deepak briefly mentions other types of yoga before explaining that Authentic Yoga focuses primarily on Raja yoga, a branch of yoga that focuses heavily, if not entirely, on meditation (this app is a combination of Hatha/Raja styles). Other main sections of Authentic Yoga include Learn to Practice, Yoga Routines, and Review Poses. The best part about the Learn to Practice section is not only does it teach basic yoga poses and positions, but it identifies poses for specific ailments like tight hamstrings, tight hips, or for building balance, decreasing stress, and more. Yoga Routines are divided between beginner, intermediate, and advanced and include routines for balance, flexibility, strength, body awareness, and even Deepak’s personal awareness routine. You can rate each routine on both difficulty and your personal enjoyment to keep track of which routines you use frequently and which ones you use only intermittently. You can also follow routines in their entirety or select specific poses. Each routine includes pictures and a video of Tara performing the poses to music, with Deepak offering instruction in the background, along with an explanation for the sequence. In addition, you can become a part of the Authentic Yoga community and send questions to Deepak and Tara directly from the app.

Can you believe the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, in a time when having an ecological mindset was correlated more with wearing birkenstocks and eating – the horror – foods not provided in a colorfully designed cardboard box? The environmentalists of this era are often dramatized as hemp-wearing hippies who tied themselves to trees, rioted against fur, and adopted a neo-Native American lifestyle of rediscovering simpler living, away from the granite confines of city interiors. Forty years later, environmentalism has changed into the yuppie mainstream, for the better: our entire lexicon is rife with words like biodegradable, ecosphere, carbon footprint, community supported agriculture and more, colleges around the country are building LEED certified buildings, the new wave of electric cars are emerging this coming year, and corporate America is taking a more sustainable approach to business (well, some, not all). Recycling has long been accessible on our curbs and eating locally grown food – or growing your own food – has become trendier, even, than the Prius, itself.

The problem with living an eco-intelligent lifestyle, however, is there’s so much to consider and remember. Thanks to green iPhone apps, all this information and much, much, much more is now available at your fingertips. Green apps are sprouting up faster than, well, sprouts. In honor of Earth Day’s big birthday, we at Appstruck combed through many different eco-friendly apps for shopping, travel, transportation, eating out and more, so you have them ready at your green thumbs.

1. Animal-Free – FREE
Animal-Free is a pocket reference guide for many common and hidden animal ingredients. Whether you’re vegan, vegetarian, part-time veg or simply trying to shop veg-friendly, this app by Symbiotic Software will help you make conscientious shopping decisions. New vegans will appreciate the list of commonly misunderstood or unfamiliar vegan ingredients that will help expand your dietary horizons.

2. Gorgeously Green Survival Guide – 99 cents
The Gorgeously Green Survival Guide is a quick reference for busy women. Developed by bestselling author Sophie Uliano, Gorgeously Green guides you through the confusion of shopping for eco-friendly choices. One of the best features is the ability to create convenient and helpful shopping lists for everything from lip sticks to light bulbs.

3. Greenpeace Tissue Guide – FREE
The Greenpeace Tissue Guide allows you to make informed decision when shopping for recycled tissue and toilet paper. Experts have rated more than 100 brands as “recommended,” “could do better” and “avoid!”

4. Harvest – Select the Best Produce – $1.99
Harvest helps you skip packaged and processed foods with information on selecting the freshest, ripest, healthiest and best-tasting produce. Now you can knock on watermelons, smell pineapples and squeeze avocados with knowledgeable élan. (read review here)

5. Locavore – $2.99
Eat foods grown and raised locally without spending hours Googling data for tonight’s meal. Locavore provides government and NGO data by state. Click on the food item for Wikipedia info and Epicurious recipes. There’s no market-finder feature for in-season foods, but it sure beats printing lengthy lists of locally grown foods. (read review here)

6. TheGoodGuide – FREE
GoodGuide helps you find safe, healthy and sustainable products while you shop. Simply scan the product’s barcode to view detailed ratings for the health, environment and social responsibility of more than 65,000 products and companies.

7. CarCare – $4.99
CarCare automatically calculates your gas mileage at the pump and reminds you when it’s time to change the oil, rotate tires, get a wax or any other service you desire.

8. Green Gas Saver – FREE
Green Gas Saver tells you when you’re accelerating or taking a turn too fast, which can hinder your gas mileage. The idea behind the app is to keep the ball in the center of the screen. When you accelerate too quickly, the diameter of the ball increases and an alarm will sound, indicating you’re accelerating too quickly. Green Gas also keeps a running score so you can see how well you’re driving in real time. A few weeks with this app and driving efficiently will become ingrained.

9. Greenmeter – $5.99
Greenmeter by Cleantechnica tracks your car’s carbon footprint and fuel efficiency while calculating weather conditions, cost of fuel and vehicle weight. You also can measure drag coefficient, vehicle pitch and rolling resistance with estimates available at CleanTechnica.com.

10. Twavel – $1.99
Twavel isn’t just for wascally wabbits. It calculates the CO2 emissions associated with your travel choices and allows friends to compare their travel footprints.

11. Green Sushi Selector – 99 cents
Green Sushi Selector allows you to research whether the sushi fish you’re about to buy comes from threatened species or has been caught or farmed in ways harmful to the environment. Fish are listed both by their Japanese and common-market names. Additional features include health alerts for mercury and PCBs, as well as dietary recommendations.

12. VegOut – $2.99
Vegetarian offerings in many restaurants are often limited and boring. VegOut makes life a bit easier with the world’s largest international listing of vegan, vegetarian and vegetarian-friendly restaurants. Search listings by your exact location or a customized location when on the road.

13. Geocaching Toolkit – FREE
Geocaching, the green outdoors game of hiding and seeking treasures, has caught on throughout the world. Geocaching Toolkit guides players between locations with clues involving puzzles, calculations and projecting a new waypoint using distances and bearings. Sometimes the calculations are easy, but this toolkit can help when calculations become tedious .

14. Lonely Planet Travel Guides – Prices begin at 99 cents
Lonely Planet Travel Guides are the guide of choice for many frugal and green travelers. Various apps provide paperless guides for both U.S. and international destinations. Some of the guides are buggy and need work, but Lonely Planet is working on updated versions. Tip: Read the reviews before buying.

15. BraveNewFilms – FREE
Find and access the latest, hard-hitting videos on social and economic issues. From exposing abusive health insurance companies to combating unregulated Wall Street greed, the videos on BraveNewFilms inform, challenge and recommend opportunities to take action.

16. Get Green – 99 cents
Get Green, from Candied Apple, provides you with daily ammunition in the battle against climate change.You’ll receive daily updates about how you can make a difference. Tips cover everything from green workplaces to green Halloween celebrations. It even has tips on how to reduce the carbon footprint of your wedding.

17. Green Charging – 99 cents
Green Changing reduces your energy consumption when you charge your phone. Launch the app when you start charging and it’ll notify you with sound and vibration when your battery is fully charged. Some of the best things are so simple.

18. Green Wars – $1.99
Based on the classic Drug Wars game, Green Wars requires players purchase environmental products for cheap and resell them for a profit. Manage your inventory to make the biggest profit on buying and selling recycled paper, LED light bulbs, reusable shopping bags, recycled paper and fixed-gear bicycles. Once you’ve earned some street cred by making deals, you can buy and sell high-end goods like solar items, geothermal pumps, carbon credits and hybrid cars.

19. iGreen – 99 cents
Stay current on the latest solar, hybrid, green and green tech news. Aggregated new sites on iGreen include About My Planet, Azo CleanTech, VentureBeat, Green Biz, Green Computing, Hybrid Car Blog and more.

20. MeterRead – $2.99
Read your meter with ease using your iPhone. Check it again later and MeterRead provides you with data to better control your power bill. This app from Zerogate displays the total kilowatt hours used since the last reading and calculates your total usage for the next 30 days.

Regardless, Rubber Knife Throw is a surprisingly fun game, with surprisingly good graphics. Given the simplicity of the game, I would think the developers, NANEV, would sway more in favor of cartoonish, lighthearted graphics, like fellow knife game Knife Toss (you may read the review here), just to keep the game simple, as the setting dictates. Instead, the graphics are fairly top notch, with smooth animations – even the Help screen is impressive, with info pages floating around in a black abyss for you to fiddle around with and bring closer to read. You have the option to select either a “chick” or “dude” to be your assistant affixed to the revolving wheel, and you may choose a difficulty of easy, normal or nightmare. Given the difficult even of easy mode, I have yet to stray onto nightmare grounds.

Your dude assistant, should you choose a male, is clad in skintight leather pants and an accompanying skintight white muscle shirt, his arms akimbo, legs spread eagle, and his eyes staring at you in cool concentration, his lips parted almost in a smile. The chick, or female, is your typical bombshell – blonde, tan, taut and firm, with skintight, breast-enhancing bustier and exposed midriff. She wears black leggings beneath a fluttering miniskirt, and dons these gladiator wedges with zigzagging, yellow laces that look as if they’d be a real pain to put on. The wheel upon which your assistant is affixed is wooden, with some painted details, and plenty of yellow, red, and blue balloons that pop up magically, along with the odd bomb, and ticking clock, which you must disarm and hit for more time, respectively. The wheel changes direction sporadically, and new balloons pop up faster, and in more numbers, each time you clear the board; bombs become more spread out, and eventually become parabombs, a trickier version of the first bombs. Should you ever throw a knife mistakenly on your assistant, or should a bomb explode without your disarming it, a point is taken away for your indiscretion. To counteract these negatives, if you pop balloons in a row, you get combo points which really boost your score. Throwing the knife, itself, is really easy to learn – simple hold down your thumb on the lower right corner of the screen to zoom in, a bullseye appearing to aim with, and then tap with your other thumb on the lower left once your aim is on target.

There’s not much else to this game, so enjoy it for its simplicity, and for its attractive characters. There’s no denying the slight sadism to the game, with its darkly saturated colors, sexualized characters, and brooding music. I almost feel that if I were given a chance to look around the room, away from the room, I would see people laying on needle beds, others stepping upon then, and more leather clad people with whips. Or, in another fantastical light, I would half-expect to see magicians performing strange apothecary rituals, or other circus eccentrics practicing their dangerous, and highly suspect crafts. I always did like the dark side to the circus.

Promotion Codes:

iPad

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iPhone

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

I suppose because the show is so brilliant, I was expecting the recent app, InHouse, by FOX Broadcasting, to be the tv app par excellence. House, for anyone who watches the show, is all at once aloof, misleadingly roundabout, beguiling, a walking intertextual reference. His character is a puzzle, a conundrum, and yet he’s not that complex a person for having, almost innately, a genius mind for medical mysteries. If we want to winnow his character down to simplistic means, his self-imposed social ostracism grew from an adolescent narcissm -his intimidating and unreal breadth of intellect unknowingly stagnated any emotional maturity, and thereby arrested his development, forever entrenching him in those adolescent proclivities of egotism, rebellion, that sense of “no one gets me.” In short, a grown adolescent is an a**. You could almost reason this as the Occam’s Razor for personality. In all fairness, no one does truly understand House, just as no one understands why a teenager may break out in aggressive retort and slam his door shut; I suppose in that same manner, it’s nearly impossible to understand the House app.

The app begins and ends in confusion, with no clear instructions to guide you in its use, and with vague, cryptic sections that leave you feeling dissatisfied, a bit empty, confused, and perhaps even with a twinge of irritation. For that, it’s a success, because that is exactly how people feel after an interaction with House, himself. The app opens to a stark image of House facing you with that deeply cutting stare of his, as if those crystal blue eyes of his are already in the process of deconstructing you, ripping your every cell of character and thought apart for his own personal dissection and pleasure – his sadism of the mind. It’s actually a good picture of him, clearly delineated from the background, and exhibiting such detail, his 5 o’clock shadow nearly prickling out at you, that it made me do a double-take, wondering if I had HD on my phone. The next screen serves as the main page of the app, acting as a conduit – biologically, even, each tab is represented in the form of a neurotransmitter – for all the other features. There are 7 tabs, including Free Clinic, Appisodes, Houseisms, Writers Room, Music Room, Dark Room, and Media Room, each of which is heavily disappointing, and difficult to understand, instruction-wise.

Like any House nerd, I immediately took to the Houseisms route, because what would House be without the mocking, taunting witticisms he effortlessly peppers in every sentence? It was too bad I was unwittingly dismayed that the only “houseisms” present were the weakly written ones, like “You should have kept reading. Heart Disease is kind of below my pay grade.” Funny, to be sure, but only within the context of the episode. Also, it’s debatable whether a diagnostician would earn more money than, say, a heart surgeon, who deals with heart disease. Of course, House is a genius, and works at this highly regarded institution, and Cuddy has a soft spot for him, so it’s believable that his pay would be astronomical (despite other colleagues, like Taub, grumbling about settling for a lower pay than he would have had as a plastic surgeon). I did enjoy one of the house quotes, but I was annoyed that there were only three quotes, instead of the alleged four, the fourth one instead being a reminder from the creators to tune in next monday for more houseisms.

I was happy to hear House’s voice calling me a “free loader” when I tapped on the Free Clinic tab to check out next. He says something for each tab you select, but that’s the extent of House’s involvement – he’s mum, otherwise. Just like the Houseisms tab, I was disappointed that the environment shown in Free Clinic (House’s iconic desk, giant red ball, cluttered desktop and more) as well as all the other tabs is static, unable to be interacted with save for one element. The Free Clinic, it turns out, isn’t anything special – it’s just a place to enter in your information should you wish to be included in a weekly rally for free prizes, in the form of cast-signed props. Needless to say, I shamelessly plugged in my info.

The Dark Room was utterly confusing to me, the environment being set amidst a wall of x-rays that just act as film reels – only they’re static images, as well, just showing you various screenshots of the most recent episode. The Appisodes link is beyond bizarre: a video turns on with a man posing as “Nurse Jeffrey, coming May 24″ and the word Appisodes written in black bold, with a question mark. I’m all for mysteries – I watch House, after all – but this isn’t a mystery so much as a question mark left hanging, with you wanting to hang yourself from it. If there is anything absolutely worthwhile on this app, it is definitely the exclusive content in the Media Room tab. For this week, there’s an interview with actors Lisa Edelstein (Dr. Lisa Cuddy) and Robert Sean Leonard (Dr. James Wilson) discussing their experience with Hugh Laurie directing. I was laughing the entire time, watching Lisa’s life-changing and amazing description juxtaposed against Robert’s dry wit about Hugh’s vision, describing it as “the worst experience you ever had, add the Great Depression, and watching Parenthood six times in a row.” It was just an amazingly funny mock-interview – grandly entertaining, but not giving you any true information, at all.

I really wanted to like his app, but all I can say is I shouldn’t have expected anything more from FOX. House as a show, as a character, is beyond ingenious, but this app is convoluted to the point of no direction, no interest, and no interpretation. Not even the excellent interviews can save it. It certainly doesn’t do justice to the show. I’m sure most fans would rather surf the web for House-related trivia and facts, and still end up wasting their time in a more productive way than bothering with the InHouse app.

French Women Don’t Get Fat, The Okinawa Diet, The China Study, Dr. Atkin’s New Diet Revolution, and The Best Life Diet are but a few of the the most notable diet books from the last decade, each one acclaimed in its own right, each one later lambasted, and each heavily featured on various bestseller lists. Anyone can argue that one such diet will make you lose weight rapidly, but that another is better for your heart, that this other diet will give you the clearest complexion, but no one can truly say that one diet is better, overall, than another – or, at least, not any one of the modernized diets we see lining our bookshelves today. Many physicians today agree that some generalized form of a Mediterranean diet is the healthiest one to subsist on, if we define healthy in terms of a localized population with a low incidence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and a host of other modern conditions. The principal aspects of this diet include a high consumption of olive oil, legumes, grains, fruits, and vegetables; a moderate consumption of dairy products (mostly as cheese and yogurt), wine and fish; and a low consumption of meat and meat products. Of course, dietary jargon like moderate consumption often fall on deaf ears – how do we define moderate? Everything, after all, both diet and people, is relative to one’s own health and experience. Dietary factors, really, are only part of the reason for the health benefits enjoyed by these cultures – genetics, lifestyle (notably heavy physical labor), and environment are also involved. The putative benefits of the Mediterranean diet for cardiovascular health are primarily correlative in nature: while they reflect a very real disparity in the geographic incidence of heart disease, identifying the causal determinant of this disparity has proven difficult. Here is where my dad would pump a fist in the air and exclaim, with all the enthusiasm of a closet theorist, the correlation between cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, and Vitamin D.

One diet book bestseller that has been captivating people around the country doesn’t so much advocate a diet, in the traditional sense, as it advocates a simple substitution method when eating out. Their motto? Eat This, Not That! Rather than require readers to plow through literature on why certain foods are better than others, or vaguely telling readers to eat only moderate amounts of something, Eat This Not That instead takes a visual approach, inundating readers with pictures of food commonly eaten at fast food establishments, or during holidays, common snacks, breakfasts and more. The idea of the book, and its recently released app by Men’s Health Magazine, is to familiarize people with the concept of which foods are healthier – mind you, on a modest scale – than others of seemingly equal caloric value. If anything, the idea is pared down to the simple, but everlastingly true dogma of “calories in, calories out” – if you eat less, you will weigh less. Obviously, this isn’t a diet book that focuses on health, per se; if it were, then it wouldn’t advocate eating at fast food establishments. The meal substitution principle is a good one, though, because many people do dine at these establishment on a frequent basis, and if you can’t deter them from eating there, you may as well steer them toward the better choices.

The Eat This Not That app takes the visual principle a step further by plugging it into a game – a transportable one, at that. I’ve often lamented at how little people read, but the fact of the matter is people are highly visual creatures – when it comes to diet books, or recognizing portions and alternate food options, images are key. There won’t always be nutritional information available for everything you eat, and even with the caloric information now required by law for many places, there’s still no solid verification that people will always be interested, or patient enough to read this information and make better choices. With the Eat This Not That game, users will slowly become adept at recognizing which foods offer them the best bang for their health; they’ll learn, along the way, that mashed potatoes, while heavy in their own right with cream and butter, still make a more well-rounded choice than a slice of sweet potato pie. A shortbread cookie, while smaller in size, and seemingly innocuous and unassuming, has nearly three times the saturated fat of a chocolate raspberry brownie, which clocks in a modest 5 grams with 370 calories. The game presents you with two images, and you must decide, based on appearances alone, which is the better choice based on potential levels of saturated fat, sodium, and calories. As the clock ticks down, nutritional info starts popping up, to help you make a more informed choice, but you’re only docked points if you play in the speed round.

Yikes, the calories.

Many of the foods contained within this game are establishment-specific, like a Wendy’s Frosty or a Double Whopper with Cheese and Fries from Burger King. The game is particularly exceptional in this regard, for sorting out the caloric, sodium, and saturated fat values for these foods because I, personally, find it very difficult to weigh my options at these places. A burger is a burger, to me, so how do I know which one actually has four times the amount of already catastrophic sodium… and why? It never ceases to amaze me the disparity in calories and fat between two, seemingly identical entrees. Other foods featured in the game, however, are a bit more vague in origin, labeled simply as “slice of pumpkin pie” or a “blueberry cheesecake.” A blueberry cheesecake from Lindy’s in New York may very well be a heart attack on a plate, but not all cheesecakes are made in the same ilk. Portion sizes, too, remain vague in the slice arena. A quarter of a pie slice of pumpkin pie could very well rival a small slice of cheesecake; of course, this is making the argument against standard pie slice sizes, which frankly, I’m sure most people are unaware. Some choices make me scratch my head, it being completely obvious to anyone which is the healthier choice, but then I have to remember the general state of the nation: we’re obese, on a cattle scale, and most people probably will choose that deep-fried crab cake with 19 grams of fat and 300 calories over the 12 shrimp cocktail with sauce, averaging around 165 calories and zero fat. Sometimes, you just want that turducken.

Regardless of personal choices, Eat This Not That is a host of information on things we really don’t want to know about. The true success of this game, and book, lies in the scare tactic when users realize, with horror, that a salad from Wendy’s, with all its innocent iceburg lettuce, can range up to 700 calories, making a burger the unforeseen better choice. It may not be a revolutionary diet plan, and it may not be the most accurate in its representation, but it does fascinate you (albeit in a somewhat horrific and masochistic way) into making wiser decisions… and for a nation that scares itself silly over trite, inconsequential things, that isn’t a bad thing at all.

The game opens with a swingy rockabilly number that makes you want to dress in four inch heels, skintight black pants, and pizazz your way around a dimly lit red room, with all the rancorous excitement of a zoot-suit wearing, fedora-donning band, of course. The music conveys well the rush of the game, because all BirdStrike entails is you shooting a bug-eyed blue bird through the sky – flung, at first, from a tightly bound trapeze wire, and then literally skyrocketed up, up and away, into the clouds and beyond, collecting seeds and other points along the way.  The blue bird, with all his unassuming birdie air, is completely willing to put his pea-sized birdie brain into danger, slamming into objects both on the way up and down, and just generally willing to put his life in your hands. I thought his name funny, and in some odd way, fitting for a classic bird who might otherwise be named the cliche Birdie, Petey, or Chickie – his name is Gerald.

When Gerald is launched from the bottom of the screen, you’ll notice a row of red and white striped rockets right above him. As you fling Gerald into the air, he straps on one of these rockets to launch himself quickly up, where the rocket eventually fizzles, and you must make the quick decision to either steer him toward another rocket plugged stationary up there, or steer Gerald as he’s falling down to one of the rockets left below. Steering Gerald is just a matter of tilting your iPhone left and right, and to make matters easier when a rocket fizzles, he flutters stationary for a moment, before pitching his head down and plummeting in a nosedive toward the ground. Gerald, for all aristocratic, dated names, is one daring fellow.

After turning into a flaming, green inferno.

Just when you think you’ve successfully maneuvered Gerald into the safe, upper reaches of the sky, you encounter a UFO, with green lights and one, extendable, robotic arm, that shoots Gerald with one ZZAPP, turning him into a burning ball of green and yellow flames. But, take no pity on your keen, feathered friend. Gerald takes this as an opportunity to destroy any hindrances on the way down, a bit like an act of revenge – you earn points by colliding the burning Gerald with scaffolding, and other things that he would, in his normal blue-feathered state, bump his head upon. 300 points are earned for each object you destroy, which rewards you more than all the eggs you collect, which are 200 points apiece. The best way to earn points in this game is to steer Gerald clear of any obstacles – the game awards you a whopping 2600 points for a certain chunk of time spent in clean flight.

Oh no!!

Other than the flying around, the rockets, the bumping of Gerald’s head, and his transformation into a ball of fury, there’s not much to this game. If you’re looking for more levels, more action, more complexity, please look elsewhere. Birdstrike is straightforward meaningless, in the best way possible. You launch a bird, you pay attention, avoid obstacles, try to rack up points, and enjoy the highly pleasing graphics and sound effects. It’s silly, frivolous, and giddy wrapped in one blue bird. Didn’t I tell you it was a good way to start the morning?

The game is one of carefully calculated maneuvers, coupled with feline reflexes, a predictive range of sight, and just some general know-how when it comes to pendulum swings and the ensuing momentum and velocity. Sound intriguing? Well, it’s not quite that in depth, but it’s still really engaging, and does employ some of the aforementioned characteristics. The game opens, without warning, to a scene of magma encrusted rocks with gray spheres dotting the screen at random locations, with your ascent ball centered at the bottom. The music is melancholy sci-fi, swimming in a thudding, murky mystery, and getting you lost in the ether – it’s an odd combination with the game’s setting, but somehow works at getting you more engrossed. At first, it might take you awhile (less, though, now that you’re reading this review) before you figure out that your ball takes ascent by latching, by magnetic tractor beam it seems, to the randomly assorted gray balls that hover onscreen. According to the tutorial – a tutorial that actually makes the game easier to understand, unlike most games – these gray balls are mines, currently unarmed. To ascend to the upper echelons of the the magma filled center of earth, and then beyond, you must hoist yourself up with the assistance of these mines, taking care to let go, after building the proper momentum, so you can fling yourself away from any proximity to the mine, to avoid colliding with it. Why? Because once you grapple onto a mine, that particular mine becomes armed, and we all know what happens to an armed mine once touched – KABLOOIE! Should you ever forget that mines are dangerous, the game reminds you by affixing a giant, red, warning target around the mine in use. Yes, I highly recommend not touching any mines, if you can help it, otherwise it’s game over, and start from the bottom again you must. To make matters more difficult, there is more than one kind of mine, because mines that simply explode upon contact, apparently, isn’t interesting enough for both the consumer and developer. No, there are mines that fall once you attach to them, mines that aren’t affected by your grapple, mines, thankfully, that give you a much needed upward boost, and mines, even, that will chase you for a bit after using them. Scary. Power-ups will help you in your route, things like Sticky Ascenders that make your ball stick to the wall, and Ascender Shields that protect you from explosions.

Based on this convoluted description, you may be leery of the game, thinking it too confounding to handle. Well, trust me, it is a difficult game – I have yet to see any scenescape other than the magma fields – but it’s well worth your time, and yes, even frustration. Ascent could very well be the most captivating, simple game I’ve come across, and this is no small feat to accomplish. It has all the addictiveness of Doodle Jump, with just as much difficulty, requiring you to develop a keen awareness of the sensitivity of your every move, your every decision. The movements are fluid, and the physics realistic – depending on the velocity of your ball’s upward projectile, you may find that grappling onto the a faraway mine may result in your ball crashing at the bottom, the downward momentum too much for your stretchy tractor beam to handle, and your weight bearing too much a load on the mine, gravity pulling it down with you (not all of them are statically positioned). It’s a bit like a bungee cord, your tractor beam, so you would be wise to think in terms of relative distance and how it affects your speed. Then again, don’t always rely on using nearby mines because you may just underestimate the speed at which you’re pulled toward them, resulting in a surprising collision and game over. Ascent certainly keeps you on your toes, and that is its most compelling feature.

Well, that and you’re playing as a geodesic ball hurtling through the nether regions of the planet by magnetic fields surrounding mines. That’s pretty compelling, too.

But, on to the game, shall we? The game impressed me upon its opening screen and title pages, which are all artistically drawn in a slight cartoonish manner, with well chosen colors, fonts, and sounds, cute maps of the like that reminded of SpongeBob SquarePants. This only made me curious as to why they didn’t extend this pretty design into the actual gameboard, itself, which dulls the senses with its dark brown motif, bamboo borders, and dark, wooden blocks falling at a slow pace, in front of a dim background. I suppose it isn’t too bad, but I was hoping for something a bit lighter and more airy in design, ignoring, of course, that most jungles tend to be dark given their expansive, sun-blocking canopies. The next level, The Desert, is set in what I presume to be a tomb, though it has a slightly metallic, mechanized feel to it, like a robotic chamber, with falling letters that clink together like coins. I do really like the music, though, in The Jungle it being something I can only describe as happy, vibrant tribal music, and in the Desert the music being subdued Eqyptian flute music.  The object of the game is to form words of at least 3 letters, connected either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally (or a combination of these), to earn points – gold, in this game – and succeed to the next level while avoiding enemies on the board, and trying to form five letter or longer words to earn bonus points per round. There are alsomechanisms in each round that help you, such as blocks that will switch letters, time enhancers, bombs that rid the screen of letters you want, and more. Much like Tetris, you don’t have a choice in deciding which letters will appear at what time, but you can move the letters as they fall onscreen – once they strike the ground, however, they become immobile, and it’s up to you to strategize where to place the next letters so you may potentially form words, and eliminate them from the screen.

Normally, this would result in a fantastic game – and it does, to a certain extent. The one, glaring problem with Captain Glyph is purely technical: the interface isn’t quite up to snuff. In other games, like Scramble 2, connecting letters is a breeze, no matter what the angle or order, but in Captain Glyph, it’s nearly impossible to select only the letters you want, without tacking on several other unwanted letters along the way. The blocks aren’t so ridiculously small that your finger wouldn’t be able to squarely tap dead center on them, so what’s the problem here? Why can I not select S-E-R-E-N-E when they’re diagonal to one another, my finger path instead forming a zigzap of S-P-E-Z-T-R- and so forth? It’s especially infuriating because while you’re concentrating on selecting letters, other letters continue to fall onscreen and before you know it, the letters stack to the top of the screen and it’s game over. At one point I was fuming so much I started forming very inappropriate words on the gameboard, only I wasn’t even able to form those correctly. *tears out hair* Foiled again.

For this reason alone, I have been unable to complete Captain Glyph. It’s unfortunate, because I really would like to explore the game further, see the other levels, and just enjoy the game. I could, potentially, just try my luck at forming only horizontal and vertical words, with maybe one or two letters jutting out in a different direction, but even then it’s too challenging to be fun. I did have success with using my pinky finger at an odd, slated angle, but that too takes the joy out of casual gaming. I do, however, see a lot of potential in this game, and I don’t know of any other word game that gives you the option of playing in 6 different languages, so Mars Toad is definitely on the right path. I hope in a future update this gaming issue will be resolved, because I really look forward to more adventures with Captain Glyph.

Thankfully, there’s not much to say about the app. Trust me, this is a good thing. History is too vast, even, to define – have you ever noticed how the most complex things are often the most simply defined, as if we know a whole subject matter cannot be easily winnowed down to scalable proportions, and so a scant, almost trite selection of words are paired up to give meaning, a “study of past events” representing the whole, overwhelming mass that is history? There is no way to contain the entirety of history within a definition, let alone an iPhone app, and so On This Day wisely pares down the information contained within to Births, Deaths, and the vague category of “Events” that generally covers only the most highlighted, or most obscure of factoids, for the purpose of entertaining frivolity.  The again, plenty of the history given in this app is amazingly random, which prompts me think, how did they choose what to cover? For today, April 07, one fact given in that in the year 529 the first draft of the Corups Juris Civilis (a fundamental work in jurisprudence, i.e. the theory of law) was issued by Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I. Well, that’s plenty interesting, but what am I going to do with this little tidbit of information? It’s been a few years since Western Civ in college. Thankfully, On This Day is a step ahead: for each historical listing in the app, there are several highlighted bits that link you to Wikipedia articles should you wish to know more. This is assuming, of course, that you already have Articles – The Wikipedia app – a recent release – but in case you don’t, the app offers you the option to add it.

So, what else happened today, on April 07? In 1860, Will Keith Kellogg, that famous American entrepreneur who created Corn Flakes and other favorite Supermarket cereal brands, was born. El Greco, one of my favorite, undefinable artists, also died on this day in 1614. In 1788, American Pioneers to the Northwest Territory arrived at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers, establishing Marietta, Ohio as the first permanent American settlement of the new United States in the Northwest Territory, and thereby opening westward expansion of the new country. In 1906, Mount Vesuvius erupted, devastating Naples. For every day in this app, it seems as if there are at least 50 entries each for Births, Deaths, and Events, so there’s plenty of reading to be done, should you be of the factoid kind. All of this reading is made easier from the app’s excellent navigation – simple, with the option to rifle through the calender and dates, or just tapping through arrows, day by day -  and handsome design, which bears an homage to antiquity with its weathered, yellowed pages, and notepad interface.

It’s not be the most exciting app, or even, arguably, the most productive – I’m sure plenty of people will be miffed about how it needs internet to work, though I think that’s a minor quibble. In all honestly, I probably won’t use it very much, if I use it at all. I’m not sure what I was expecting with this app, but after checking it out, it’s probably the very best it could be. It’s just a collection of facts, in a well-designed package, and if that’s what you’re seeking, then this is the app for you. It won’t win any awards, and likely has a shelf life as dated as the facts contained within, but hey, at least it’s not a thinly veiled attempt at recycling an existing app under the guise of an original one. I actually kind of like it.

*Lets out primal scream*

GGRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWRRRRRR!!!

Okay, maybe that’s more of a animal roar, equivalent to me morphing into some hairy creature, with large, glistening fangs, and tearing off my shirt to make way for my expanding, beastly chest. Why the screaming? The panting and pounding of the chest, the wrath? Fly-Flap, a new game by AstalaVista. Trust me when I say those flies can be so pesky.

Of course, frustration isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Frustration can indicate either a ridiculously impossible scenario, or something that proves challenging enough to force you into repeated plays. Fly-Flap falls into the latter category: the game is solidly difficult. It challenges your reaction rate and finger speed by challenging you to kill flies and avoid beetles, at increasingly manic speeds. In some levels spiders appear, to your much-needed aid, and provide you with a means to double your points by slurping down any fly you drag to their mouths. They gobble them down and zip away off screen, but be careful not to tap on the spiders by accident, or you’ll send them falling to the ground, a slight scream escaping from their spider mouths. Their screams, along with the other sounds in this game, are apparently manufactured by the developers, themselves – and by manufactured I mean straight from their mouths. Oh yes, those screams and buzzes, and, yes, even the irksome,

Spiders will eat flies for you and double your points.

snickering, slightly evil and beckoning “mehehehhehehehehe” sound the flies make are all brilliantly contorted from the developer’s vocal chords. I must give them a lot of credit for this because the sounds are all top-notch, if slightly eccentric.

Fly-Flap offers two game modes, Arcade and Campaign, the first of which entertains you silly with more and more flies, at faster and more blinding speeds, and the second of which offers a more structured gameplay, with levels and specific objectives. I preferred Campaign mode right off the bat, on principle alone – levels with explicit directions give me focus, a well-established goal to work toward. And, trust me, the objectives are not easy. Starting off on the second level, you must feed 10 flies to a hungry spider in one minute, while killing other hordes of flies that appear onscreen. In any other game, this would be an easy feat, but in Fly-Flap you have something called a lifemeter that loses life whenever you miss squishing a fly and tap the air, instead. That’s right, you’re actually punished for missing, and the game will end if your lifemeter runs out. Secondly, to actually earn the points you deserve for squishing the flies, you must also tap the point bubbles they release two seconds after the fact. Given the mad speed at which you’ll be squishing flies in this game, it’s not always an easy task to pop all the bubbles – you’re almost guaranteed to lose out on 500 points per round.

Whatever you do, DON'T TOUCH THE BEATLES. Period.

As you progress through the levels, you’re given various aids and bonuses to help you in your quest to rid nature of flies – poison, anti-bug spray (kills a multitude of flies at once), horns (frightens enemies), blinding (makes flies stop), slowdowns (no explanation needed), and more. Beetles are also introduced, and these are bugs you want absolutely nothing to do with. They’re only good for making you lose the game, erupting in a flurry of purple and pink gas that encases surrounding flies, and basically calls the Game Over title to appear. Definitely avoid tapping on these suckers.

Overall, the graphics are good, the sounds amusing, and the gameplay challenging and quirky enough to keep things interesting. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how entertaining the game was, and I will probably return for a few more rounds. I wish the game wasn’t quite so hard – sometimes it’s exceedingly difficult to aim for the flies, and sometimes it feels as if my finger taps aren’t registering – but in a way I relish the near impossibility. Far too many games are quick to play and over in a flash, so why not embrace Fly-Flap’s challenge and enjoy a little bug squishing?