iPod App: Glass Tower 2

Glass Tower 2: A simple but fun and well presented iPhone game.

Glass Tower 2 features a wide range of bonuses,
but watch out for the blocks rain!

The object of Glass Tower 2 is simple.  You begin each level with a tower of red and blue glass blocks and have to destroy the blue blocks but save the red blocks.  Tapping on a block causes it to shatter and disappear and thus the challenge of the game is to eliminate the blue blocks in such a way that the red blocks aren’t lost over the sides of the supporting platform.  Once all blue blocks are removed the level is complete and bonus points are awarded for each red block saved.

You start the game with a generous quantity of ten lives and lose a life for each red block which is lost over the edges.  During the early more straight forward levels this initial healthy helping of lives seems rather generous but on later levels if things don’t go exactly to plan you can end up with several red blocks falling off the sides and therefore your allowance of ten lives comes in handy.

The Worthy Of A Bigger Audience 2012 Awards (Part 1)

My favourite album, book, iPod app, party and TV show featured on Worthy Of A Bigger Audience during 2012.

Worthy Of A Bigger Audience is only a small blog I run in my spare time as a hobby but I’ve enjoyed sharing my opinions on some of the music, movies, TV shows, etc, which I love and think deserve to be appreciated by a bigger audience.  So as 2012 is now at a close, just for a bit of self-indulgent fun I thought this would be a good excuse to revisit the reviews featured over the last few months and pick my favourite choice from each category.

So without further ado here are my favourite albums, movies, TV shows, etc, featured on Worthy Of A Bigger Audience during 21012…

The Big Roar by The Joy Formidable

Albums:

Wonder by Lisa Mitchell
Singing From The Grave by Anna Von Hausswolff
Proof Of Youth by The Go! Team
The Big Roar by The Joy Formidable
Pomme Fritz by The Orb
The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man On Earth
High Violet by The National

This was by far and away the most difficult category to decide and not just because I’ve reviewed more albums than anything else on Worthy Of A Bigger Audience.  I absolutely love all of the albums reviewed in the list above so if I was to compile my top fifty favourite albums of all-time then pretty much all of those listed above would be strong contenders for conclusion.  In the end though, I had to pick a favourite and I decided to go for The Big Roar by The Joy Formidable simply because it just keeps getting better and better with every listen.

Winner: The Big Roar by The Joy Formidable

iPod App: Super Stickman Golf

Super Stickman Golf: A golf game with its own personality...

Super Stickman Golf features weird and wacky power-ups.

There have been literally hundreds of golf games over the years and yet with Super Stickman Golf developers NoodleCake have still succeeded in producing a golf game with its own personality and a game which features enough original twists to make this worth a look in the overcrowded golf game genre.

Things start off looking fairly typical with Super Stickman Golf featuring a side on 2D view of each hole and following the basic formula of many golf games with the familiar power meter and angle control for each shot.  However, this is where the similarity with golf simulations ends as the creators behind Super Stickman Golf have gone for a more fun arcadey style of game rather than an accurate recreation of the game of golf.  The design of each hole is far removed from a traditional golf course so it would probably be more accurate to describe this as a 2D side-on golf game loosely in the spirit of crazy golf.

iPod Apps: Amazing Breaker by Dekovir Entertainment

Amazing Breaker for iPod: Slick graphics and atmospheric sound effects add to the overall enjoyment of the playing experience.

Amazing Breaker by Dekovir Entertainment.

Like many of the most successful iPod games, Amazing Breaker by Dekovir Entertainment takes a simple idea and implements it extremely well.  Each level sees you having to destroy a beautifully rendered ice sculpture with only a limited number of bombs to launch from your catapult.  Destroy over ninety percent and you progress to the next level, with the exact destruction percentage also determining how many gold stars you are awarded.  To earn a perfect three gold stars you have to destroy the entire ice sculpture, which on some of the later levels can be quite a challenge.

That’s the basic premise behind Amazing Breaker but there are of course extra features which give the game added depth.  Firstly, your bombs come in many various forms, from the most basic red coloured spike bomb which simply explodes when it makes contact with an ice sculpture, to the more versatile green coloured split bomb which splits into three separate explosive mines if you touch the screen while the bomb is in flight.  Keep these mines within close enough range of each other and they stay linked together and therefore detonating one of the bombs will trigger a chain reaction detonating all of the linked mines.  A similar bomb is the purple coloured helicopter bomb which allows you to place three separate mines with more precision and which again if kept within range of each other can link up for an explosive chain reaction.

iPod App: Babbel Swedish by Babbel

Can’t Recommend This Highly Enough.

Match the word with the correct photo.

If Babbel decided to make this a paid app it would still be brilliant value when you consider the amount of content it features.  The fact that it is actually free therefore makes it an absolute must have app for anyone currently learning Swedish or who would like to learn Swedish.  Twenty seven categories of vocabulary, each with a further twelve sub-categories (split between six basic and six advanced sub-categories) means there’s enough content to keep the Swedish student going for quite a considerable length of time.

To add even further to the depth of content, once you have selected your vocabulary category and sub-category, you then have three sections within each sub-category to work through and help you learn.

Section one is ‘Learn And Remember.’  This breaks you in gently and involves basic tasks such as matching a Swedish word to the correct photo or simply identifying the correct first letter of the Swedish translation of a selected word.

iPod App: Tiny Tower by Nimblebit Games

Tiny Tower: Simple But Addictive Fun



Your Tiny Tower 'bitizens' going
about their daily business.

The basic idea behind Tiny Tower is a very simple concept - build a tower, earn money, build extra floors - and in truth there's not that much more to it, but it's still nevertheless a very well implemented and a very addictive game.  It’s the simplicity which makes Tiny Tower very easy to jump into, but then in order to keep you interested Nimbit have also added various features which give the game lasting appeal.

The currency used in the game is TowerBux and these can be earned by various methods such as fully stocking a floor, fulfilling a request to find a specific resident or ‘bitizen’ as they are known, or completing one of the weekly missions.  The missions involve collecting specific items with a connected theme.  For example the ‘A Baby Is Born!’ mission involves collecting 2,700 family portraits from the Photo Studio and 270 toy blocks from the Toy Store.

Once you have accumulated enough Towerbux you can then spend them on practical uses, such as upgrading your floors so they can hold more stock, or on more frivolous goals such as buying fun outfits for your bitizens, for example chicken, robot or caveman costumes among many others.