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.

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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.

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.

Enter Twistrix by Avalon Alliance. Now, this is a puzzle game – it’s name is even a bit of a puzzle, spinning fumbles on your tongue. The concept is similar to a rubik’s cube in that there are moving bits and pieces, all involving configurations of sorts, that, once resolved, lend the puzzle to becoming organized by color scheme. However, unlike the rubix cube, there is no set algorithm for solving the puzzle – you must instead rely on a sequence of logic, moving pieces one slot at a time, and filling empty slots with other pieces. In this manner, Twistrix resembles more those sliding puzzles kids get for free in goodie bags from Chuck E Cheese, or as party favors, the puzzles scrambled in a small, 2 inch square with many squares within, that, once arranged in order, reveal a stunning, teenage heartthrob or puppy.

Twistrix is arranged in its own, unique fashion. If it resembles anything at all, it would be a traffic light, with its initial red and green colored dots, set inside a revolving gray-green turntable of sorts. The entire contraption may be spun to the left or right, or you may spin individual rows, once again, to the left or right. All the rows stacked upon each other (each level has varying amounts of rows) create columns, of which only one is facing you at a time, but each holds its own assortment of colored balls. An empty slot is available each round – sometimes more – to aid you in moving the balls around, and you must figure out how to move the balls – up and down, rotating the rows – so that each column holds a stack of like colored balls (i.e. a stack of 5 red balls). To make matters more challenging, as you progress through the levels, more colors are added.

The graphics may not be particularly stunning, and sometimes my finger will fail to illicit a response from the game, but Twistrix accomplishes its most important goal: it’s a brain twister, in a deeply furrowed brow kind of way. I admit to fumbling a bit on the first round – the first round - and I sheepishly twisted things, moved things here and there, before I finally developed a feeling for the game. It’s not that the game, itself, isn’t intuitive, it’s just the mechanism, the turntable, is a puzzle premise unlike any I’ve seen, and so it took a few moments for my brain to register the logical progression of things. Once I understood the mechanism, it was free-flying; mind you, I’m not saying it was easy, merely, the puzzles made sense. And, that is the best puzzle of all.

When I think of real estate, I think of people figuring out down payments, and leases, and mortgages, potentially second mortgages, and even foreclosures, given the recent times. Being a realtor doesn’t sound like much fun to me, particularly when your income reliability goes up and down with the housing market, which in this country, as we all know, has been pretty depressing.

But, all seriousness aside, Mansion Expansion by Vindicate Games is just good practice in folly and fun, putting you in the shoes of a plucky real estate agent who tries to satisfy the expensive whims of wealthy looking people, one being a woman decked out in your prototypical New England, Hampton style of dress, with pearls, coco chanel frames, and even the ever unflattering tennis visor. She entreats you, seemingly with a whiff of her upturned nose, with finding and buying her an extravagant mansion upwards of $100,000, which in this game, may as well be $20 million.To do so, you first start off with a meager sum of money, with the mission of buying properties and then selling them in the hopes of making a profit off your investments. On the playing field – shown as a grassy knoll with a giant mansion in one corner – houses and apartment complexes begin popping up, indicating their readiness to be purchased. They

9 Stages in the game

start off at a reasonable price, but due to the “housing market” in this game, their value quickly increases; if you’re not quick on your toes, you may buy a property at a more expensive price than you could have, reducing your end profit once you sell. To turn this misgiving around, you must wait as the property’s value increases, and then sell at a price you perceive to be high enough to reward you with a substantial profit – otherwise, if you wait too long, the housing market will again fluctuate against your favor, decreasing the property’s value. All fun and games, right?

You may wonder, how do I figure out when to buy and when to sell? In the real world, it’s pretty hard – a bit like gambling, or just regular old stockmarket investing, two things I’m trying to learn more about – but in this game, these handy markers in the shape of green and red triangles indicate when prices are going up, and when prices are going down, respectively. Obviously, you want to buy low, and sell high – that’s a general rule of thumb, and just plumb common sense. If you buy high and sell low, you won’t just be out of the job, you’ll be homeless. The way Mansion Expansion makes the game a bit more challenging is by having homes rapidly pop up all over the screen, each with their own individual price fluctuations; the price changes are never ubiquitous across the board. When I first played, this did seem to pose a challenge – I’d often forget about a small home and sell it when it was

Buy and sell homes - but watch out! They lose their value right under your nose.

worth next to nothing – but then I realized that if I just glazed over, letting my eyes fasten onto all the little green and red flags, all I had to do was buy a home the instant it appeared (guaranteeing the lowest price), and then selling it as soon as its green arrow turned red (insuring me that it’s as high as it can get before it lowers). Frankly, there’s no strategy involved, just quick reflexes. If the game wanted to make the fluctuating housing market more “believable,” it shouldn’t have the properties rise in value once, and then completely devalue. It should be a random ebb and flow of rising in price, then lowering, then rising again, etc. This way, it’d be harder for me to predict just how high the property could achieve in value.

The levels take some time to beat after the first level, so plan on buying and selling a lot of homes before you’re able to purchase that ridiculous, oversized mansion for your client. There are 9, unique stages in this game, cute graphics and music, and 12 achievements – in future updates the developer plans on releasing more stages. Apparently, there are even hurricanes in the game, but in a few solid hours of play, I have yet to experience one – it just reeks of doom, so I hope I see one onscreen soon. While Mansion Expansion may not be a go-to game for me, I found it surprisingly entertaining, zapping up a solid hour of finger taps from me. I would definitely vote it for most original game, most serious double-take game, but I do wish there was a little more to the game. Then, it might just be a permanent, quirky fix on my phone.

Soho may be one of the premiere, chic shopping destinations of New York, rife with what I deem a hoity-toity air, a slowly wavering art scene, and a street-walking population of girls is the latest Citizens of Humanity skinny jeans, bug-eyed Prada glasses, oversized leather bags, and cone-shaped, red-lacquered Christian Louboutin heels – or, now that it’s spring, sky high

Plenty of categories to rifle through...

wedge platform that turn someone of my stature, 5’9, to right around 6’1. Soho definitely has its own flair, as does any neighborhood of Manhattan, and Midtown is no exception. Midtown isn’t a neighborhood, per se, but more a collection of neighborhoods, like Chelsea, Gramercy and Hell’s Kitchen, to name a few of the more familiar ones, and it encompasses a vast area, ranging from between 14th Street and 59th Street, from the Hudson River to the East River, at about five square miles or 12 km total. The core of Midtown Manhattan is from about 31st Street to 59th Street between Third and Ninth avenues, about two square miles – this is the area most commonly referred to as “Midtown” and is where the famous Times Square is located.  All in all, midtown denotes any area not labeled as “uptown” or “downtown,” and it carries a very symbolic New York essence to it, representing – if you will – the very heart of New York with iconic places like the Empire State Building, the Museum of Modern Art, Madison Square Garden, the New York Public Library, Penn Station, Carnegie Hall, the Plaza Hotel, Madison Avenue, Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and much, much more. The New York you see heralded in film was most likely shot in some area of Midtown.

... and 3D maps to boot.

What MIDTOWNinmypocket does is assist you with finding your way around the giant epicenter that is Midtown, by carefully recording every single worthwhile place to see, shop, eat, sleep, lounge, or otherwise engage in mundane tasks (banks, churches), all in painstakingly organized categories and mapped locations. The app is designed in exactly the same manner as SOHOinmypocket – right down to the chic, Parisian-looking girl with giant, white framed spectacles -  with the option to either sort through categories to find something specific, or by browsing the map for your current location to see what’s nearby. Any mapped location may be tapped to view further information, and pertinent things like address, telephone, hours, and such are given for each place. When viewing a mapped location, you may also tap the “go” button, for your ease, so the app can navigate you there from your current location.

It’s astonishing, actually, the precision of MIDTOWNinmypocket (as well as SOHOinmypocket). The only downside to this app is the map loading time can be slow, but it’s noticeably faster on the 3GS model – it’s not that big of a deal, anyway. It turns out the developer will be releasing a SANFRANCISCOinmypocket soon, which I absolutely cannot wait for – San Francisco, and the Bay Area in general is where Appstruck is based, and I’m always looking for excellent guides to the area. Even if you’re a native, or at least, a long-term resident, there’s always the chance you’ll be surprised at what a guide can tell you.

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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.

After playing it, I’ve decided Numbl is definitely my choice in math games, for improving basic speed skills in mental math. No one wants to play a game of decoding differential equations and higher end calculus, except for those few and far between math majors, but nearly anyone can partake in a game of speedy arithmetic – and that’s essentially what Numbl is, coupled with the strategy of using the least moves possible to clear the entire board.

The game is shockingly good-looking. Good sound effects of the right pitch and digital cheeriness bring to mind a retro computer system, only it’s paired with a contemporary blue sheen that reminds me of the Chase credit card company. The setup reminds me of a calculator, with numbered buttons in a 5×4 area, an arrangement I suppose, is a good likeness to have when the game revolves around calculating a sum. The object of the game is to clear the board with the least moves as possible; in other words, it’s best to use the most numbers possible per turn, to faster eliminate numbers from the board. The number 11, for example, when shown at the top to be solved, could simply be solved by the addition of the two numbers 9 and 2. But, since 11 isn’t a terribly high number – as opposed to, say, 17 – then it’d be wiser to use an allotment of small numbers, like 3+2+2+4 – given of course, that you have these numbers available. Should you worry that you may receive a number that you cannot create with the remaining numbers at hand, fret not: Numbl takes into account such limitations and allows you to use a single number of equal value to the number at the top (e.g. use a 6 for a 6). Obviously, for the purposes of clearing the board, I recommend not to tap a number 9 to solve for 9 when you could instead use 2+2+5. Besides, when a pesky 17 shows up, you’ll want to have that 9 on hand.

Easy to pick up and easy to learn, Numbl also offers a nice split-screen mode for two-player. Also, both the one-player and two-player modes are timed, making speed a crucial element to the game. I prefer one-player, myself, because I enjoy improving my own mental acuity at my own pace (faster, Jackie, faster!), but to each his own. I hope in later versions Numbl will offer a similar version of play with subtraction, multiplication and division. You may as well cover all the preliminary bases, right? In any case, whoever is lucky enough to nab the sole promo code won’t regret downloading this game.

Promotion Codes:

MRFA3W369MWR

*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.