Bizarre Holidays! Part 2!

Okay guys, it's back.  Bizarre Holidays!

Tomorrow, June 22, is National Chocolate Eclairs Day.  I am totally getting up early to eat some donuts before (or at) work.  It's also Stupid Guy Thing Day.  Hey, none of my guy things are stupid.

Tuesday the 23rd is National Columnists Day and Take Your Dog to Work Day!

The 25th is National Handshake Day.  Shake someone's hand.  Just don't forget to wash your own.

Friday the 26th is Forgiveness Day.  So be the better person and forgive someone this week.

After bestowing the forgiveness, celebrate Decide to be Married Day on the 27th.

See you next time!

Not creepy, but tons of fun

The Creeps! $0.99 In-depth review

I have to admit it.  I'm finally getting tired of Tower Defense games.  I did a review and strategy feature on a few of them several months back, and since then I really haven't played much.  That is, except The Creeps!  Now, I'm not yelling at you.  The exclamation point is actually part of the name.

What's so different about The Creeps! that gives it such longevity?  Well, several things.  Read on. If you saw my reviews of Tap Defense, Fieldrunners, and 7 Cities (post 1, post 2), you'll know that different companies are pretty good at developing new and interesting approaches to the same old (new?) tower defense genre.  Fieldrunners and 7 Cities both contained two game types: one that ends when you beat all the levels and one that keeps on going until you lose all your lives.  The Creeps! does one better: it has 3 gameplay modes!  Okay, now I am yelling at you.  But let's go back a bit and talk about the game itself.

The Creeps! is a tower defense game.  And like all other tower defense games, you have enemies moving along the screen attempting to get to a goal.  You place towers, which cost money and come in different varies, to destroy your enemies before they get through.  If you let too many enemies get through, you lose.  Simple.

In The Creeps! you are the intrepid defender of... this little kid's bed.  He's creeped out because there are monsters literally coming out of his closet to get him.  Yeah, I'd be scared too.  The monsters move on a set path to the bed, where the kid's head is poking in and out from under his covers.  A recent update to The Creeps! from its creator, Super Squawk Software, adds some new towers and maps, adding to the longevity.  Now there are several graveyard maps, Mars maps, and undersea maps.

Regular maps can be played in Survival Mode, where you play a map for a certain number of waves and then you're done.  They can also be played in Endurance Mode, where you play an unending number of waves... well, unending until you die of course.  I'll get to the third mode in a bit.

The cool thing about The Creeps! is something I hadn't seen in any previous tower defense game: the ability to target certain enemies.  When it gets crazy, sometimes it's good to be able to tell your towers who to fire on, especially when one monster is just about go get to his goal.  With other games, you just have to rely on the game's A.I. to decide who your towers want to kill.  But that's not all.  The Creeps! features other inanimate objects that sit on the map that you can target with your towers.  There is some delay time in between waves of monsters that you can spend to get extra points and money from destroying these random objects.  They include trees, headstones, rocks, coral, and other stuff.  When these obstructions are destroyed, you can build towers in their place.  In harder levels, this adds an extra element of strategy in that you cannot win w/o clearing out most or all of these objects - there simply would not be any room to place your towers otherwise.

The above is especially important in the new and cool mode that Super Squawk added in the newest update.  It's called Doorbuster Mode.  As I said before, enemies come from the possessed closet door and move along a path to get to the kid's bed.  In Doorbuster Mode, your main goal, aside from destroying enemies, is to destroy the door from which they come.  The door takes a long time to destroy, so you need to get your hits in in between waves of enemies, and you need to upgrade your towers accordingly.  In some doorbuster maps, you cannot even place a tower close enough to reach the door until you've destroyed enough inanimate map objects.  Lots of fun.

I've written this much and haven't even talked about the enemies and the weapons!  I'll go through those really quickly.  The enemies as well as all the surroundings are really cartoony and colorfully drawn.  The game is fun to look at, really.  In the Mars and Graveyard maps (of which there are plenty), enemies include ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, and other horror film staples.  The sound effects, especially the sounds the enemies make when they die, are superb and hilarious.  I especially like the vampires saying "Ow, zat hurts!"  You really have to hear it for yourself.  In the underwater maps, you encounter creatures like sea urchins, eels, crabs, tiny whales, and snail-like things.  In all maps, every once in a while you'll run into bosses, which are simply larger versions of the regular enemies.

The towers really go along with the cartoony theme of the game.  Your main weapon is a toy ray gun that shoots blue laser beams.  There is also a boomerang, which homes in on enemies and causes explosion/splash damage.  The tower I like a lot from a creative and stylistic standpoint is the glue bottle, which is this game's version of the "goo tower" that slows enemies down.  I mean, it's a freaking bottle of glue!  How cool is that? Anyway, we also have a flashlight, which is kind of like a lightning/tesla tower, and a paper ninja star.  Ooh, those paper cuts hurt.  All regular towers can be upgraded up to a third level, which makes them faster and do more damage.

There are also super towers that work for a limited time only before needing to recharge.  These include a UFO that does massive damage to whoever it's hovering over, a giant black widow that does super glue effects, a tornado that can carry enemies backward or just keep them in one place for an easy kill, and an oil can that allows you to muck up the path that enemies travel along.  All these super towers cost a lot of money but can really be game changers. They also make use of the iPod touch or iPhone's accelerometer.  You tilt your device to control their direction.

The Creeps! is good enough for me to ramble on and on about it in this post, and at $0.99 it's really a no-brainer for anyone interested in Tower Defense.  If you didn't think the others were for you, you may want to reconsider and try this one out.  I believe there is also a Lite version.

One year out

I went to the UCLA College of Letters and Science commencement last night. Yeah, it's that time of year again. This means that it's already been a full year since I graduated (from the school of Engineering, not the aforementioned one). The ceremony was pretty darn good, despite having to sit in the nosebleed "yellow seats" and not being able to see anything.

It did feel a little awkward though, to hear the first two speeches, one by an apparently fantastic community icon who received the UCLA Medal last night, and the other by the UCLA Student Body President. Both were women, and both very well spoken and energetic, but I got the strange sensation that I was at a political rally rather than a graduation ceremony. Now, I have nothing wrong with motivating "young people" (ugh, I hate that term but it's the most appropriate one here) to become active in shaping their community and nation, but I would expect such a widely-attended event to be a little more neutral. That's all I'll say about that.

The keynote speaker, Brad Delson of Linkin Park fame, was very, very, very good, and that's 3 "very"s more than I had expected. He was well spoken like the two ladies, and, being a fellow UCLA grad, albeit class of '99, was able to throw in familiar references to early Rieber dinners (I'm not sure which dining hall is open early these days) and late night Puzzles runs for good measure. When finding out he would not be able to keep the "honorary" cap an gown, he decided to take it off to reveal a custom UCLA basketball jersey and shorts underneath, with the number "09" and the name "Keynote" on the back. Then he played an exclusive, never-before-heard (and hopefully never again heard) acoustic guitar rendition of Britney Spears' "I'm not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman." I must be getting old because I didn't recognize the song until it was practically over, and all the kids knew what it was almost right when he started. All in all, Mr. Delson gets an A for the night, and was much, much more engaging than the boring guy who spoke at my boring graduation who broke his promise not to be boring in the first 3 boring minutes of his boring speech.

Anyway, being back at UCLA always gives me a weird feeling now. I've been back there several times for various reasons (mostly, but not all being basketball games), and I'm really seeing the campus in a different light. Before attending UCLA starting in 2003, I mostly identified the campus as "that place w/ the cool student store and the historic Pauley Pavilion." Yeah, UCLA merchandise and basketball. That's all it was. When I started attending, I got more familiar with the entirety of the campus. As much of my time was spent going to class or doing homework, the place just made me think of work. No matter how much fun I was having, there was still that feeling that I was there to go to class and to get a degree. Come to think of it, that might have been the wrong approach.

Lately I've been thinking back to what the college experience was like. A lot of the specific factual knowledge that I gained in classes in order to survive my exams has all but gone away from my brain. What's left is just the capacity for critical thinking and the desire to dig deeper when things don't make sense. College is about the experience, and college courses are all about learning how to learn because in the end, you won't be valued for your useless knowledge about obscure topics, but rather how you can apply what you've learned about approaching problems and situations in life. I think if I had kept this in mind, I would have studied differently - possibly more efficiently, and also less. And I would been able to allow myself to have more fun when not studying or going to class.

I'm one year out of college, and UCLA is now, along with its other purposes, a place of memories. My mind no longer associates the campus with me having a massive things-to-do list. Now the studying and classes and test taking are all in the past, and I am able to relax and have more fun when I go back. But the thing is, I just about never go back there just for fun, making this new state of mind pretty much irrelevant. "Stop and smell the roses" is cliché but so true. Too bad you can't go back in time and smell the roses of the past.

One year out, and I'm realizing I missed out on college because of the classes, and because of my mindset. Well, at least we'll always have Ackerman, and we'll always have basketball.

...after they're done with the Pauley Pavilion renovation, anyway.

Bizarre Holidays! Part 1!

Here's the first installment in a new series: Bizarre holidays! Here I will just list some interesting holidays that, for whatever reason, are not widely observed. Enjoy.

June 1:
-National Go Barefoot Day! If you're at the beach, you're probably already observing this one.
-Dare Day. I dare you to eat an entire pie. In one sitting.


June 2:
-Leave the Office Early Day! Yeah! I'm totally doing this one. And you can tell my boss too.
-Yell "Fudge" at the cobras in North America Day. If you see a cobra, be sure to pass this message onto it.

June 3:
-Repeat Day. Repeat Day.

June 4:
-Hug Your Cat Day. Also known as Get Violently Scratched Day.
-Applesauce Cake Day. I've never had Applesauce Cake. Is it good?

June 5-6 (First Fri/Sat in June):
-Donut Day. Yup. Sweeet.

June 6:
-Doo-Dah Day. Yee-haw!


Information courtesy of:
http://www.brownielocks.com/month2.html
http://www.holidayinsights.com/moreholidays/index.htm

Defending the not-so-friendly skies

It's review time again! One thing the iPhone/iPod Touch, with its touch controls and accelerometer, would seem to be the perfect platform for the classic vertical overhead scrolling shooters, such as the 19xx or Raiden series. Apparently developers feel the same way, and have come out with a multitude of these types of game. Today I'm going to focus on two, though an honorable mention goes to "Siberian Strike" ($0.99), which was highly reviewed over at the Touch of Gaming podcast. A horrible mention goes to Sky Thunder, which I'm not going to link to. It's too hard and not fun.

iFighter, $0.99
Anyway, first up today is iFighter. You pilot a WWII-style plane that has autofire enabled, so your job is simply to maneuver your plane to shoot enemies and avoid their fire. There is also a Bomb button to press to deal extra devastation to everything on the screen. Defeating certain enemies reveals medals and stars, which you collect to increase your score.

Some scrolling shooters are such that when you touch an enemy you immediately lose a life. iFighter is not such a game. With each life you have a certain amount of "health", which goes down by some number when you get hit. Take enough damage and you lose a life.

iFighter's creators provided three different control schemes to match your play style. First is "Joypad" mode, where a virtual joystick is superimposed on the screen and you "move" it around with your thumb. This is the control scheme being used in my screenshots. Since the joypad shown is very small, the smallest thumb movement can make your plane move farther than you wanted it to. It takes some getting used to in this regard. On the plus side, as opposed to Swipe mode (see below), Joypad mode doesn't cover up areas where your enemies might show up and surprise you.

The second control scheme is "Swipe." Here you keep your finger on the screen and your plane will go to where your finger is. Normally this would be my control scheme of choice, but the plane tends to lag behind the speed of your finger so it's a bit inaccurate to me. Still, this method is best for putting the plane exactly where you want it to be. The downside here, as mentioned above, is that putting your finger on the screen can cover up things that you'd want to see for survival's sake.

Finally the "Motion" scheme allows you to use the accelerometer to tilt your device to make the plane move. Motion is pretty responsive and probably my control scheme of choice, though the plane still doesn't move as fast as enemies do, even with sensitivity set all the way up. The other problem with Motion is that it doesn't work too well if you're playing the game in a moving vehicle.

All in all, if you like this genre of games, iFighter is good, but the controls can be a problem. Enemy planes move really fast and you start out with a pathetically weak weapon. The variety of control schemes is nice, but all have their upsides and downsides. At its current $0.99 price, it's hard not to recommend it.





Sentry Alpha, $0.99
The other scrolling shooter I'm reviewing today is Sentry Alpha. Unlike iFighter, Sentry Alpha is set in a more futuristic setting, and your enemies are alien ships. You start out with a standard dual blaster, but you quickly earn lots of weapon upgrades just by defeating a bunch of early enemies at the beginning. You have unlimited homing missiles, of which you can shoot more at a time when you get them upgraded. Bombs in Alpha do not span the whole screen, but rather are designed to hit the otherwise-inaccessible ground-based targets.

Like iFighter, Sentry Alpha features a multiple lives + energy system, so getting hit once doesn't really kill you. The game does, however, count how many times you got hit in each level, along with the number of enemies killed and number of medals collected.

Sentry Alpha only features one control scheme, accelerometer controlled. This is definitely a problem if you're in a moving vehicle, but when you're not, it seems to work very well. Autofire for your blasters is enabled, but if you hold your finger down on the screen your ship will fire faster. Bombs are activated by a sideways shake, while missiles can be fired by an up-down shake. Alternatively, there is a missile button on the lower right and a bomb button on the lower left of the screen.

I found Sentry Alpha to be slower-paced and easier than iFighter. I keep waiting for it to get more challenging, but there's no lack of fun to be had here due to the ever-increasing number of weapon upgrades I keep getting. Enemies come at you slower and you normally have ample time to get into position to hit them or get out of the way. The heat seeking missiles sure help too.

At $0.99, it's bargain. Interestingly, the app description on the app store says Sentry Alpha is on sale for $0.99 'til May 1. Here it is, May 24, and it's still on sale. Get it while it lasts!

Heck, might as well get both iFighter and Sentry Alpha while you're at it.

Stupid iPod Touch tricks

When you first get your iPod Touch you are blown away by the slick interface and all the neat features that you now can't do without. It's chock full of features, though some of them might not be very obvious. Some are in the instructions (which I rarely read, and I'm not sure that you do either) and others are not.

1) Music controls anywhere: a neat thing about the iPod Touch is that you can use other programs besides the music player while you are listening to your music. This is easily done by getting your music started and then pressing the Home button to return to the Home screen. From there you can choose whatever app you want to use - Mail, Safari, and even games that support you providing your own music. But what if you're using that app and you run into a song you don't feel like listening to? Double-tap the home button real fast. This'll bring up the music controls wherever you are, allowing you to pause, skip forward, or skip backwards. Tapping the Close button will dismiss the controls and return you to your regularly scheduled app, or touching the Music button will quit your current app and bring up the full fledged Music player app. The only downfall to this feature is that if you don't double click the Home button fast enough, or if you give it 3 clicks instead, it behaves as if you pressed it once, returning you to the Home screen.

1a) The double-tap feature also works if you're at the "Slide to unlock" screen.

1b) Sometimes apps (usually games) support you playing your own music but by default will silence your music upon startup and play its own music instead. To get around this, double tap the Home button while in the game and press Play. This will silence the in-game audio and resume your music instead in most (but not all) apps.

2) Screenshot: This is self-explanatory, but it's a real killer feature. Say you have something cool or hot on your screen and you want to save it for posterity (or at least to show your friends). You can save an exact picture of what you're seeing in your Photo library. Keep in mind that you have to be fairly quick about this. While holding the Sleep button, press and release the Home button, and then immediately release the Sleep button. The screen will flash white and you'll hear a camera sound. The iPod touch doesn't have a camera on it like its older sibling the iPhone, but you can still capture memories on it.

3) Auto-Pause: Say you're listening to something on your headphones and someone important walks up. You want to pause the audio because you don't want to miss the rest (as is often the case with audiobooks and podcasts) but you can't be bothered to quickly bring up the audio controls (either in the Music app or via the trick in #1). All you have to do is quickly unplug your headphones. You'll notice that the audio automagically pauses itself, because it knows you're not listening anymore. Sweet. When you plug your headphones back in, it doesn't resume automatically, which makes sense because while unplugged headphones = not listening, plugged-in headphones does not necessarily = you have the headphones on your ears. Bring the audio controls back up to resume listening.

4) Rearranging/deleting apps: tap and hold on any app's icon on the home screen until everything starts jiggling. Yes, that's right, jiggling. You'll notice that all the third-party apps will also now have "x" buttons on them, allowing you to delete them from your iDevice. Also in this mode you can tap-drag icons to arrange them to your heart's content. Remember that the bottommost row holds apps that are shown no matter what page you're on, so keep the most frequently used apps down there. Press the Home button to exit Jiggly Mode.

5) Quicker page changing: Once you get enough apps to fill several pages (believe me, this will happen pretty soon with all the free apps available), you may find yourself swiping your finger across the screen over and over to switch between pages. There is a little invisible area to the right and to the left of the "page indicators" at the bottom (the white and gray dots) where if you simply tap, it'll change the page. So if you tap just to the right of the page indicators, it'll go to the next page, and if you tap to the left of them, it'll go to the previous page. Also, if you're on any page other than page 1, pressing the Home button will return you to page 1. Handy if you have more than 2 pages of apps.

6) Battery saver: The killer feature of the iPod touch in my opinion is the wifi. Even when not connected to an access point, however, the wifi drains battery. If you go to your Settings app you can disable your wifi. I highly recommend doing this while not using wifi - for example, when you're driving somewhere, so it doesn't keep draining battery looking for access points. Turn it back on when you know you're going to use it.

6a) Auto-brightness: Along the same lines, you can find the Brightness setting in your Settings app. Nothing too fancy. You can adjust the brightness. Turn it down in dim lighting, and turn it all the way up in bright lighting. The interesting feature here is "Auto-Brightness" which uses the light sensor located near the top of the iPod's face. This feature can also help to save battery by sensing the light level in the room.

All of these tricks also work with the iPhone.

Tune in next time for some app recommendations and some more neat features.

Do I know you?

I have 209 Facebook friends as of this writing. I only communicate with about 20 of them more than once a month. Of those 20, only about 10 of them are real friends whom I see or talk to daily/weekly over IM or e-mail. The other 189? I haven't talked to them in ages.

Now, I'm not the kind of person who goes and adds friends willy-nilly without good reason. If you request to be my friend, I actually consider it very carefully before clicking Add. I first ask "do I know you?" Well, I don't ask you, but I ask myself regarding you. I'm not on Facebook to make friends, just to keep them. There have been one or two exceptions, but I won't mention those.

But do I really know those 189 people I never talk to? I don't know about you, but when I see someone in person whom I haven't talked to in years, it's usually more or less a big deal. Sometimes it's full of handshakes, hugs, smiles, but mostly it's the whole "catching up" thing. Before I even talk about any kind of business or plans anything current, I find it important to make up for the period of time in their lives and my life that needs to be filled in. But this mentality came from the old days before Facebook and these other social networking things, when I wouldn't regularly "see" what 209 people are doing several times per month.

It's a strange new thing - knowing what people are doing on a regular basis even when you haven't talked to them for years. I see their activity in my news feed: pictures, statuses, notes, posted links, wall messages and I often want to comment on them. But I feel really, really awkward just randomly commenting because it's basically doing exactly what I don't like doing - addressing an old acquaintance without saying "hi," "it's been forever," "what's new?"

Am I alone on this? Do you care if someone you haven't even thought about in years just up and comments on your page without so much as a "hello"? Is this the direction we are going, where no matter how far away we are from each other, talking for the first time is no big deal?

What do you think?