Among these apps I found Apparatus, which is rapidly climbing up on my top ten android games. Apparatus is a brain teasing game, where you are supposed to make a ball get into a nest. Easy, a piece of cake during the few initial stages. As levels go by, difficulty increases at an awesome pace and puzzles require more than 10 minutes each… Actually, I spent over 30 minutes on my last one, and I still haven’t reached level 30. Yesterday, this game was available for 10 cents.

This game reminded me of other games you may want to take a look at, if you like this kind of masochism:

• Cut the Rope: this game is very “cute”, sometimes even childish, but some levels are still difficult. Available for 1 USD or 0.68 euros.
• Refraction: I don’t know how many long hours I’ve been playing this game. Some levels are so hard you could even spend days on it and still enjoy it. I must recognise I failed to solve the last world… after spending several hours on each stage, I failed. It costs 2 USD, but you can try the lite version first, with 20 free levels.

• World of Goo: Very nice adaptation from the original PC game, everything looks exactly the same as the original game. Strongly recomended. Unfortunately, I had already finished the PC version, so this one was a piece of cake but the last levels. It costs 4 euros.
• Quell: Another challenging game which is loaded into my phone. As peaceful and charming as challenging. Very good app indeed and costs 1 euro.

To sum it up, I would recomend “Cut the rope” and “World of Goo” as a must have game for Android users as they represent two nice introductory games into android puzzling. Refraction, quell and, above all, Apparatus would be left only for gamers with a deep interest into brain teasing puzzles and have already solved the ones above.

Related posts:

1. Boardgame randomizer for android
2. Android phones heterogeneity

Here you have the videoreview

Beware of the height you need to get above the board. It took me several attempts till I realised I had to stand up and rise my hands a little bit to fit the 19×19 board on an average table. Otherwise, the program will cut down the sides of the board… though I still don’t understand the reasoning behind this.

Another point which I’m curious about is the need for internet connection. Since the image needs to be interpreted on a remote server, the image needs to be uploaded… but wouldn’t it be possible to make the process locally with the latest phones? I mean, during the second half of this year some dual-core cell phones have been released so it would be an interesting option to add to the app.

Here you have the market links for both apps:
Go Scoring Camera – Trial version
Go Scoring Camera – Full Version 

On the next videoreview, I’m going to talk about another awesome app which turned out to be very useful at our club.

Related posts:

1. KGS Android Client
2. Android Go applications

Poor me. For some unknown reason, noone has thought of making a single “complete” mobile phone.

-Samsung galaxy S: the strenght of, currently, the best processor (Hummingbird at 1Ghz + PowerVR SGX540 GPU) together with the best screen quality (super AMOLED at 800×480) and the longest-living battery make it look like a complete mobile. Unfortunatelly, it will only last till it slips through your hands and crashes into the floor. It’s plastic case and the screen fragility won’t make it last any longer. Altogether with the lack of LED flash place it far away from perfection.

-HTC Desire HD: while the processor is also working at 1 Ghz, it’s not focused on multimedia and gaming, so its performance when it comes to watching high-definition videos or playing games is just disappointing. On the other hand, it’s got a 8 Mpx camera with double LED flash. Moreover, if we check the device’s weight (about 45 gr. more than its competitors), this phone could also be used as an improvised weapon. An expensive one, indeed.

-Nexus S: though it was just released in the USA and I wouldn’t be able to get it for Christmas, this phone was produced by Samsung with exactly the same mistakes from their Galaxy S. Differences between this two are focused on connectivity (bluetooth, NFC…) and the camera. Having Samsung learnt from Galaxy S, they decided to place an even worse camera. Moreover, they’ve removed the microSD support. Congratulations.

-Sony Ericson Xperia 10: certainly a good choice. Though its processor is slighty behind HTC Desire HD and, obviously, way below Samsung’s cell, it’s one of the best balanced cell phones around. Same screen quality as the DHD. 8 Mpx camera with LED flash with 16 zooming capability. Weight remains inbetween while battery expectancy is that of Samsung’s. Were the design and the interface similar to HTC’s, I’d go for this one.

There are just two options left:

-Wait till other terminals come out. Dual-core mobile phones and Nvidia Tegra 2 will land onto the market during the first half of 2011.

-Give up and hold on to the “take-as-it-is” iphone.

Related posts:

1. Boardgame randomizer for android

Everything went fine -successful Google checkout, KGS client only weights 470 kb- so I was logging into KGS within two minutes. Unfortunately, my Online-Go-Anxiety (aka OGA) focused my mind on watching games, so I’m still lacking the playing experience with this client.

I’ve got a HTC Magic, one of the first devices, with a low resolution, but the board, avatars and bowls still showed up nicely, so I guess results on better devices should be somewhat nicer. After having watched 3 games on a row, it was time to actually analyse the app instead of just KGS games.

The lowest part of the screen includes the navigation buttons which, if pressed long enough, bring up some extra options, and the chat window.

While this app is the only -and, therefore, the best- KGS client, it disappointed me somehow. In fact, what worried me the most, was that games with lots of tenukis were hard to follow. While marking the stone on a normal PC with a circle is enough, it seems to fall short as a notification in such a small screen. Maybe some sort of double stone-blinking would be helpful.

One of the games I saw included a nice amount of peeping tesujis so I thought of sharing it. Unfortunately, there isn’t any “Save game to disk” option. The tactile function is weird while watching a game, as you can point on the board and make a square appear, but its utility remains unknown for me. The trackpad moves this square around the board instead of navigating through the game.

Though my hopes may have been to high, I’d say that, to sum it up and taking into account its 15$ price, I’m a little disappointed with the final result. Obviously, since these 15$ include two months of the KGS plus service, it may be useful for users who would like to give KGS+ a try, but I don’t think it is fair for users who wouldn’t use it. On the other hand, I must admit that I haven’t tried to play with it, since I got some deficiencies in my internet signal while I was on the train and I suffered my monthly OGA crisis.

Edit: You’ll find further discussion on the comments, including it’s developer and KGS owner, Bill Schubert.

No related posts.

Tired of having too many of these dialogues with my play-pals, I decided to fix it last month. There are a few boardgame randomizers available over the net, but I failed to find one suitable for my android phone. Though it would be awesome to have this feature included in the “BGG mobile” app, it seems we’re not going to enjoy it in a short term.

So here is my tricky solution… with some pros and cons.

1. To begin with you have to install the bbg2nanDECK application on your windows machine (or virtualize it). Once you’ve installed it, you’ll have to set it up properly so that it connects to your BGG profile.
2. Choose your preferred card style with all the information you’d like to have. If you know something about programming, you may want to create your own style or modify one of the availables. In fact, I modified Solamar’s style, but forgot to move the “Weight” on the upper right corner…
3. Run nanDECK. It’ll create a card for every single game you own on BGG.
4. Install PictureViewer on you Android.
5. Copy the nanDECK cards to your phone and make PictureViewer point into their folder.
6. While in PictureViewer, select random mode, just once.

Now, every single time you open PictureViewer, you’ll have a random game displayed from your collection; you can randomize again by sliding to the right side. As no doubt you have already guessed, this method is only possible for a BGG user, with a previously known collection (since it requires some work at home before actually using it) and some patience in order to understand how nanDECK works for the first time.

As you can see from the image above, this unknown game called Go is recommended for 2 players, takes 90 minutes on average, I’ve rated it 10/10 though BGG average is 7.7 and is ranked the 36th. It was created around -2200 and has a weight average -as game complexity- of 4.0/5. There is a short description, a list of categories where you can find it and its mechanics. Both BGG rating and weight are extracted from BGG users average

No related posts.

Smartgo has already announced a version for the Ipad, available in the appstore for $19.99. According to Anders’ blog: “the two apps are still pretty close, but over time I expect them to diverge:

• The screen size of the iPad allows whole new features that will either be missing or limited on the iPhone.
• Even for shared functions, the UI will over time change away from the iPhone version and become optimized for the iPad.
• The extra power will allow more game records. Initially, SmartGo Kifu includes 20,000 pro games, but I hope to increase that significantly as soon as I know how the iPad performs.”

Unfortunately, having a different version for the iPad means that iPhone users will have to pay an extra license if they want to enjoy this version of Smartgo in their new tablet.
This is one screenshot from the emulator screenshots, where we can already see there are a few new options available:

As for server clients, Yetle at godiscussions.com has already taken a picture of the KGS client working through VNC in his iPad. William M. Shubert (KGS’ developer) has already stated that there will be a special edition available for Android tablets, avoiding to specify if there’s going to be an iPad version for this server. If we take into account the lack of a KGS client for iPhone, we can already assume iPad users won’t have a specific version on a short term.

No related posts.