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MacHeist Gives Away Free Software

Arvind Srinivasan — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:36:40 -0600

We really like free stuff. Any time we go to the mall, we spend half our time at the Apple store, and the other half sitting in the free massage chairs at Brookstone. However, you don't often get expensive things for free on the internet (those "free ipod" scams don't count).

MacHeist would like that to change. The MacHeist Bundle is a software bundle released annually, coupled with an online puzzle-esque event that gives you a bunch of free software and discounts on the final bundle. The puzzle itself is pretty interesting, albeit incredibly complex, but this year, they are offering a free "nano-bundle" of software for those who don't want to attempt the puzzle.

To put it simply, anyone can go to www.macheist.com, create an account, and download 5 applications, normally worth $154, for free: WriteRoom, Twitterific, TinyGrab, ShoveBox, and Hordes of Orcs. If 500,000 people end up downloading the bundle, they will add another app -- Mariner Write. Overall, this is a great deal, and you should check it out here.

Shaun Inman Fever

Ray Aguilera — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:09:33 -0600

The biggest challenge of the Web is finding information you want. For a while, bookmarks sufficed, giving users an easy way to quickly return to their favorite sites. As bookmark lists grew, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) became the preferred tool of Internet power-users. An RSS reader makes it easy to track a large number of sites, but eventually, you’re subscribed to so many feeds that finding the good stuff becomes a challenge. Enter Fever, a Web-based RSS reader that tries to solve this info overload by sorting your news by importance.

Fever is Web-based--but it’s strictly BYOS (bring your own server). If you’re comfortable setting up blogging software like Movable Type or WordPress, installing Fever is a snap. Unfortunately, there’s no trial period or live demo, so you can’t really try before you buy.

Fever's Hot List is a great feature, but it can quickly get overrun by one or two high-traffic topics.

Fever’s killer feature is the Hot List, where stories are ranked by importance, rather than listed in chronological order. You’re asked to separate your feeds into Sparks or Kindling. Sparks are the sites that you read frequently. Kindling are sites that are less important, such as blogs that repost lots of links on your favorite topics. The Kindling concept encourages large numbers of subscriptions, which can improve your Hot List, without cluttering up your main view. Stories that get a lot of mentions across all your feeds rise quickly on the Hot List--a clever way of helping you find the most important news stories, and it works quite well with larger numbers of feeds.

Our biggest problem with Fever is the lack of granularity. We subscribe to tons of tech-related RSS feeds, but we’re also interested in other topics. But since the tech feeds outnumber the others, our Hot List is mostly tech news. You can use Fever as a traditional feed reader, grouping feeds into folders, but the Hot List feature does not apply to specific folders. Another solution could be setting up multiple profiles geared to different interests, each with its own Hot List, but Fever is strictly a single-user affair.

Luxor

Susie Ochs — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:17:17 -0600

Some of the App Store’s 12,000-plus games are new ideas conceived expressly for this new platform, while others are retreads of more familiar fare. Overnostalgic for the Neon ’90s, we were excited to play two recent remakes of classic puzzle games.

Combining elements from Zuma and Breakout, Luxor has you firing your own colored balls at advancing chains of other colored balls. You’re trying to remove balls from the chain by matching three or more of the same color. The chains move along tracks that twist and turn and double over each other, so you can’t always get a clear shot. And if you don’t clear them fast enough, they reach the end of the track--and you lose.

Luxor's marble-matching gameplay is set against an Egyptian background.

Luxor for the iPhone plays well, with 88 levels and sharp graphics and music. You can catch falling coins and power-up tokens that slow down or reverse the chains or give you more powerful ammunition. And Luxor supports the Plus+ gaming network, letting you challenge your friends on Twitter and Facebook.

See also: Bust-a-Move, another recent remake of a classic puzzle game.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert iPhone

Zack Stern — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:16:04 -0600

You can hide the clutter on the right, but you'll often need to use those commands.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert translates a great Mac and PC game into an adequate iPhone title. Instead of designing the action around the portable device, this version feels like developers crammed in as much of the full computer game as possible. We wanted a nimble, portable, action-strategy blitz, but got a clumsy game that frustrates as much as it entertains.

Red Alert casts you as commander of either a U.S.-European alliance or Russian threat in an alternate-history battle for the world. Fanciful sci-fi units, including attack bears, zeppelin bombers, and electrified turrets create most of the excitement.

You'll occasionally need to construct buildings before battle.

The strategy unfolds from those units' specific abilities. Bombers go unchallenged unless you have fighter planes or surface-to-air guns available; and tanks roll over rocket-launcher infantry in close range but are in danger if the soldiers are perched in buildings. This depth is the best part of Red Alert, although if you just amass enough powerful tanks, for example, you can often muscle past strategic attacks.

Red Alert downplays its building construction. You'll still want to strategically place defensive turrets to keep foes out of your base, but in the story mode, most everything is built for you already. And in those situations, you'll almost never run out of money, so you don't have to create buildings that mine resources for money. The cost per unit feels irrelevant; just keep buying more to slowly chip at the enemy.

Select missions cast you as an army of one, tossing strategy aside.

While sufficient, the game controls left us wanting a mouse and keyboard. You'll tap single units to make selections, and tap an enemy to attack. Double-tap a unit, and the game will select all of the same type. A mode lets you draw a box around units, select everything on the screen, and even toggle between three collections of your own choice. But we needed more precision, getting frustrated by trying to tap a vulnerable engineer out of a cluster of tanks. And a big palette of building commands often gets in the way of on-screen action.

The game felt buggy and slow on an iPhone 3G. Especially after creating a big army, audio effects stuttered, and we had to make multiple scroll and zoom gestures to see results. Red Alert took about 35 seconds to first load, and often 30 seconds to begin a level. It crashed occasionally, too.

Braid

Susie Ochs — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:56:05 -0500

A triumph of game design, Braid mixes 2D platforming gameplay, ingeniously crafted puzzles, time manipulation, and a melancholy story open to multiple interpretations, beautifully packaged in stunning hand-painted artwork. It’s not an incredibly long game, it doesn’t have a multiplayer mode or online play, but what’s here is more than enough to suck you in, keep you engrossed, and make you really use your brain.

Designed by Jonathan Blow with artwork by David Hellman, Braid took Xbox Live by storm in 2008, winning numerous awards from gaming magazines. It was later ported to Windows, and Hothead Games brought it to the Mac. The puzzles and story are the same, and the Mac’s keyboard controls couldn’t be simpler: arrow keys to move, the space bar to jump, and the Shift key to rewind time.

Just because you're progressing in the game doesn't mean you'll know what's really going on.

That rewinding-time mechanism is the game’s foundation. Each world starts by introducing a time-manipulation ability that you use in the world’s levels to collect inconveniently located puzzle pieces. The puzzle pieces are hard to get to, and figuring out how to access them can keep you confused for hours. Luckily, you don’t have to restart a level if you die or just screw it up somehow--thanks to the time-manipulation tricks, just rewind to a point before disaster and try again. The soothing music and the sense of satisfaction you get when a particularly tricky problem finally presents its solution kept our blood pressure low enough to keep playing--for the most part, anyway.

You can continue on to the next level without collecting every puzzle piece, and return later on to a level that’s got you stuck. But you do have to find all 60 puzzle pieces in Worlds 2 through 6 to unlock the final level, World 1. Why are they out of order? That has to do with the game’s enigmatic story line, which deals with love and loss, forgiveness and redemption, and possibly the creation of the atom bomb (seriously). We don’t want to give anything away--and the plot can be interpreted a few different ways--but after you’ve finished the game, Google “Braid ending” to read some eyebrow-raising theories. It’s mature for its headiness, but not necessarily inappropriate for kids, who might skip the story entirely and just play the levels. We’d feel comfortable letting a 10-year-old play.

Bust-a-Move

Susie Ochs — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:56:54 -0500

Some of the App Store’s 12,000-plus games are new ideas conceived expressly for this new platform, while others are retreads of more familiar fare. Overnostalgic for the Neon ’90s, we were excited to play two recent remakes of classic puzzle games.

Taito’s Bust-a-Move, also known in Japan as Puzzle Bobble, resembles the 1996 Mac puzzle game Snood. You fire colored balls at a puzzle of colored balls, trying to match three and make them disappear. The balls gradually move down the screen, and if they reach the bottom before you clear the board, you lose.

Bust 'em before they move.

Bust-a-Move has a totally forgettable story, plus bright graphics and two ways to fire the ball: with a simple tap or using a slingshot technique. We had a hard time aiming, but if you fail a level and retry it, the game inserts a dotted line to help you line up your shots better. Special pieces include cannonballs that wipe out everything in their path and exploding balls that take out an entire color at once. Plus, you can bank shots off the sides and even the top of the screen. Bluetooth connectivity lets two players battle in Versus mode (not supported by the first-gen iPod touch), and Challenge mode is a never-stopping barrage of puzzles.

See also: Luxor, another recent remake of a classic puzzle game.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Nic Vargus — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:20:12 -0500

The sixth Potter book's excitement is magically transformed into a linear collection of minigames.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince places you in Harry’s robes as he progresses through his sixth year at the famous wizardry school, Hogwarts. At its core, Half-Blood Prince is basically a well-polished minigame collection with flashy franchise backing. The graphics aren’t terrible, especially when bumped up to the highest resolution, though they may seem a tad dated. The terrific music is pulled straight from the film.

The game consists of three main parts: dueling, potion-making, and Quidditch. Each section is enjoyable at best and bearable at worst, but none are fantastic, and the best part of the experience is exploring the beautiful Hogwarts backdrop.

Players can join clubs to practice their skills and earn badges for outstanding performances. Of the clubs, Dueling is the most fun and arguably the simplest. You get five spells to choose from that either stun or injure your opponent. The combination of stun-and-charge attacks works almost too well, and seasoned gamers will quickly dispatch their foes.

Harry's duels are far less bloody than, say, Zorro's. Today's kids are so coddled.

Quidditch is nearly as simple: You steer Harry through obnoxiously large, glowing stars as he nears the golden snitch. But Harry’s broom is gliding along a preprogrammed track--you need only wiggle the mouse toward the stars and let the game do the rest of the work. Hitting pumpkins or flying directly through the stars awards you with more time.

Potion-making is more complex. Players will feverishly shake potions to bubbling and drop crunchy green worms and rats into boiling cauldrons before the allotted time reaches zero. The most difficult potions come with a laundry list of ingredients and a merciless timer.

Though Electronic Arts opted for an open-world approach, Harry is shuffled from one quest to the next in a decidedly linear fashion, each mission unlocking the perpetual “next area” for exploration. Nearly Headless Nick ensures you can never get too lost, walking you straight to your next objective with the press of a button.

The game is short--expect to spend a breezy 8 hours beating the main story, while collecting everything Hogwarts offers could double that playtime. For many wizard wannabes, the game will satisfy and remain enchanting, despite its shortcomings.

iPhone Accused Again of Gobbling Up Bandwidth

J Keirn-Swanson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:39:39 -0500

Remember when Ralph De La Vega, AT&T's Wireless CEO, suggested that the carrier might have to figure out some way to effectively better manage the bandwidth of their 3G network?

Well, he's not the only one singing the "iPhone's hogging up the airwaves" blues. Turns out the Chairman of the FCC has that same song stuck in his head, and between the two of these men, iPhone users could be running into some stiff opposition to their unlimited access plans.

Bandwidth Use History and Projection. Source: Gigaom.com

FCC Chief Julius Genachowski in a recent ranging conversation with Business Week discussed net neutrality, broadband expansion, behavioral advertising, Google, censorship and filtering. But the comment he made that most caught our attention was this one in response to the question: How concerned are you about the available spectrum for wireless services?

Genachowski:

We've been spending time on long-term spectrum policy because the data suggest we face a spectrum gap. The demands that are being created by the [Apple] (APPL) iPhone and other mobile broadband technologies threaten to outstrip the amount of spectrum available for commercial mobile...

While Genachowski does mention smartphones in general, the only one singled out by name is the iPhone. This may be in part because he's an iPhone user or he may be obliquely referencing AT&T's complaints. Again we see the suggestion, much like De La Vega's that iPhone users are significantly cutting into the available spectrum bandwidth and that something will have to be done.

As it stands, while no one is talking about anything concrete, iPhone users would do well to keep their ears tuned to this conversation. From the sound of it, things might get interesting.