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I genuinely have no clue how we missed this the first time it hit the internet (in late 2011), but Lego’s Life of George [Free] just blew my mind. This is everything I wanted and more as a Lego-loving child. Check out the video:

In a nutshell, utilizing the Life of George ($26.99 on Amazon) Lego set, the app challenges you to build different Lego objects, then take a photo of them using the camera of your iOS device. The game scores you based on how long it took you to build the object, and a recent (Well, “recent” as in Christmas!) update added 30 new challenges and 45 new models to build.

Has anyone out there tried this? Looking at the charts, Life of George seems to have had some pretty dismal download numbers, peaking at #57 in the family subcategory. That’s too bad, since this is the exact kind of stuff I like seeing the iOS camera doing.

Thanks Marcos!

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I created my Yelp profile in early 2010. I’d used the site for years before then, but for whatever reason, I didn’t feel compelled to start writing reviews until a few years ago. Yelp, in the off chance you’ve never heard of it, is a massive community-driven site which primarily focuses on offering honest customer reviews for all sorts of businesses. It’s equally useful to find a place to get lunch, somewhere to get your hair cut, a cool shoe store, or a million other things. Taking a step back, there’s tons of similarities between Yelp and the App Store, but Yelp does two things that make a massive difference.

Just like how you can find listings for anything from a roller-skate repair shop to a studio to learn fencing, you can equally come up with just about anything on the App Store. Both feature an insurmountable amount of content that’s hard to even imagine, and both Yelp and the App Store orbit around an equally important customer review system. Sure, sites like ours provide a more “official” venue for long-form reviews, just like a proper newspaper columnist would offer restaurant reviews, but I’d argue that a platform for legitimate customer reviews is just as useful.

“Legitimate” being the key word here. Developers on our forums have encouraged players to leave reviews for their games since, well, the birth of the review system. This sort of vague motivation generally results in reviews which I’d describe as both thoughtful and extremely useful for fellow App Store shoppers. Whether the particular review has a positive or negative slant usually doesn’t matter, as people who are leaving reviews just for the sake of leaving reviews often form at least a semi-intelligent argument for why you should (or shouldn’t) download something.

Then two things started happening.

Developers started putting these sorts of annoying pop-ups in game, interrupting gameplay to pressure players into leaving a review. Also, they forged this strange ultimatum of sorts, dangling the potential promise of future updates in exchange for five star reviews. In my opinion, both of these things taint the entire review process to the point of bordering on complete uselessness.

If you’re already into the second world of Ragdoll Blaster 3 [99¢] and you get this confusing pop-up asking if you like the game, why would you tap “no”? So, you hit “yes,” but at this point your head isn’t in a “alright I’m going to sit down and write something useful” space, you’re thinking, “I just want to get back to the game.” Similarly, if you’ve got a game you even vaguely enjoy and you notice the all-too-common update text that mentions something along the lines of “your five star reviews keep updates coming!” you’re not leaving a review because you want to assist in the purchasing decisions of the iOS gaming community, you’re doing it because you like free stuff.

I can’t really fault developers for this behavior either. It’s difficult to keep your head above water on the App Store, especially when there’s only space on the top lists for around couple hundred apps/games to be even making a decent amount of money at a time. Deciding you’re going to take the moral high ground and not beg for reviews could make the difference between keeping the lights on in your studio or not.

So, anyway, switching gears back to Yelp, if you’ve used it at all you’ve likely noticed that nearly all reviews you come across are at least somewhat useful. You almost never see reviews like these on Yelp:

You might stumble across the occasional funny but vague review, or reviews that are as simple as “Try the tacos!” but I’d argue that both of those are more useful than “love it” or “hate it” with an accompaniment of one to five stars.

Yelp accomplishes this in two interesting ways.

First off, there’s a real motivation to build your own profile up on Yelp. They’ve done an outstanding job of making your Yelp profile something you’d link your friends to show them what sort of things you enjoy locally, or maybe places you went to on vacation. It features all the social networking tropes that make it feel like home, complete with a basic avatar system and space for superfluous personal details such as “favorite thing.” As a Yelp user, you don’t want to leave a useless review because the profile creates a feeling of ownership to your reviews, and provides a record of all the places you’ve been. Comparatively, this is about the closest thing you have on iTunes.

There’s no ownership to that page. No customization, and no reason at all why you’d ever link it to someone or include it on the links on the side of your blog, or anywhere else that you’d normally put links you care about. There’s more to it than that. Even with a profile, some people will just flat out never get invested enough into things to put forth that effort to produce good reviews. Similarly, automated review spammers don’t care at all that they can have an avatar. This is where the truly ingenious Yelp review filter comes in to play.

Check out this fantastic video which details how and why it works:

The crazy part about the Yelp review filter is it works so well you don’t even know it’s there. As mentioned, I’ve been using Yelp for years. Yelp explained how the filter worked around the same time I officially joined the site. I discovered that it existed only a few weeks ago when I noticed that I could solve a CAPTCHA at the bottom of a restaurant’s review listing. Doing so revealed reviews of the same caliber of App Store reviews, what have systematically been deemed worthless by the Yelp review filter.

Apple has the resources to make the App Store incredible, and make app reviews just as useful as Yelp reviews for a new restaurant. They’ve already dabbled in building a low-level social network inside of iTunes via the Ping music service. A similar feed or apps that friends of mine are buying (and hopefully reviewing) would be immensely useful. From there, you’re only an avatar, a tidy URL, and a few silly profile data points to having something that people would genuinely want to link people, and in the process, pour effort into maintaining beyond “★☆☆☆☆ sux” or “★★★★★ ownz”.

Genius for apps already exists, and provides great recommendations for things you should try based on your previous purchases. I can’t imagine it being much effort to massage that same algorithm into flagging drive-by low-content reviews from people who can’t be bothered to spend more than 10 seconds typing out a coherent thought, review bots up voting, or people mudslinging with one star reviews of apps/games they don’t like- Especially if it falls out of line with what this customer would typically enjoy per Genuis.

Can you even imagine how different the purchase experience would be on the App Store if reading customer reviews was closer to reading product reviews on Amazon? Comparatively, just think for a second how much a wild west style review system like the App Store currently has would completely ruin sites like Amazon, Yelp, and others that are dependent on honest and thoughtful customer reviews for purchase decisions.

And no, the “Was this review helpful?” system is not a solution. All that seems to have proven is that, in some strange way, the App Store hive mind believes that of the 11,546 reviews for the current version of Angry Birds, this is the most useful:

This is one of the best games I’ve ever played! Plus it extends your time on the toilet by a good 10 hours.”

I rest my case.

The Yelp system is by no means perfect. Yelp has been the the target of all sorts of accusations both from business owners and internet conspiracy theorists. However, the fact remains: When I read Yelp, I almost without fail genuinely feel like the reviews are useful to me. App Store reviews, on the other hand, generally just result in a whole series of face palms.

I’d love if that changed.

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Alright, so even though Meanwhile for iOS [99¢] isn’t normally what would come to mind when you think of iOS games, it’s something that I bet most people out there aren’t aware of. Also, if you’re the kind of person who likes Choose Your Own Adventure style books like the variety of gamebooks we’ve posted about in the past, this will be right up your alley. Maybe you’ve got kids that like comic books, Meanwhile would be equally perfect in that situation.

I first heard about its physical book form, which is worth checking out just so you can see the clever way its all laid out. You make decisions in the comic book, then follow colored lines to the next panel you should be reading. The amount of decisions included is just silly, as the book boasts 3,856 different possibilities. The plot follows a kid named Jimmy who goes from deciding if he (or, you, as the reader) wants vanilla or chocolate ice cream to deciding the fate of the world after encountering mad scientists, time machines, robots, and tons more.

The comic is targeted at kids in grades 4-6, so if you’re an adult looking for some hard-hitting plot points, you’ll likely be disappointed. If, however, you’re just into comic books and want to check out a really clever implementation of a Choose Your Own Adventure style comic, this is 99¢ you have to spend. The way they adapted the actual book to iOS devices is fantastic. I particularly enjoy how you still see irrelevant (to your particular story path) panels as you read through the comic, which really just makes you want to replay it over and over again to figure out how to get to something you saw that was particularly crazy.

It’s on sale today only, due to an update landing which adds completely re-mastered high resolution art. So, don’t wait too long or it’ll be back up to $4.99.

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Last week, Spry Fox released an iOS version of Triple Town [Free], their hugely popular match-3 town builder for the Amazon Kindle, and more recently for Google+ and Facebook. We really liked Triple Town in our review, and it’s personally been my biggest obsession of the past week. The ability to upgrade the game tiles by making matches and the limited amount of space to work within added a tremendous amount of depth to the gameplay far beyond your typical matching game.

Today the first update has hit for Triple Town, which mostly focuses on fixing bugs. Things like broken Game Center achievements, the inability to restart games sometimes, and tons of other quirks that come with a version 1.0 release have now been taken care of. The update description also goes on to say that there are several other known bugs that are currently in the process of being hunted down and fixed, one of which includes a problem with turns regenerating after exiting the app.

You see, Triple Town is a freemium game. It comes with a set amount of “moves” for free, and the ability to purchase in-game coins for real money which will let you buy more moves when you run out. Alternately, these moves are supposed to slowly regenerate while you aren’t playing the game, giving you a way to continue playing for free if you had the patience.

One other alternative is to just buy unlimited moves with a flat in-app purchase fee of $6.99, and with all the troubles going on with the regenerating turns Spry Fox wants to entice you to go for the unlimited option by reducing its price down to $3.99. After getting hooked on Triple Town myself, I had no qualms dropping the $6.99 for unlimited play, but others have felt like it was a bit on the high side for the kind of game it is.

If you’re one of those who felt the price was high, the $3.99 price is a lot easier to swallow, especially for a game packed with such fantastic gameplay. Plus, the maintenance update makes it a much more solid game all around, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing plenty of more updates to Triple Town in the future as well.

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While the iOS device’s multitouch screen has introduced a whole new way of interacting with software and enabled game developers to rethink the fundamentals of game control, there are definitely areas where it falls short. One such area is in the on-screen approximation of a physical control stick or D-pad. Ever since we first mentioned the iControlPad, three and a half years ago, button mashers particularly frustrated by virtual controls began eagerly waiting for such physical controller accessories to arrive. This summer, the iCade and iControlPad did arrive and developers wanting to go that extra mile began adding in support for these controllers, where it made sense.

Gametel controller

In a short time from now, the controller market will be gaining another iOS-compatible unit for gamers to choose from in the form of the Gametel Bluetooth controller from Fructel AB. News on this one began spreading a couple of weeks back, but we only just learned of the device, likely due to the Android-centric PR that surrounds it; there’s scant mention of iOS devices on the product webpage. Luckily, C64 for iPhone [App Store] developer Stuart Carnie of Manomio pinged me to let us know that the unit works quite well with iOS devices (by way of an iCade emulation mode, the addition of which was driven by Stuart, himself), and that he is particularly impressed by the unit’s ergonomics.

The Gametel controller pairs with any iOS device, appearing to be a keyboard to the host unit. It has a spring-loaded arm / brace extending from the top of the unit that allows it to firmly grasp most any type of app phone, including all iPhone and iPod touch devices (not the iPad, of course). The unit sports a digital directional pad, four main action buttons, a Select and a Start button, and two shoulder buttons. (It lacks the analog nubs offered by the iControlPad.) The Gametel device delivers 9 hours of battery life — for itself only, not the host unit — and is charged via micro USB cable.

Jimmie Johansson, involved with the project, informs me that the 120mm x 67mm x 24mm unit is light weight and durable and fits easily into a pocket. Production of the first batch of devices is happening right now, as I post this, and it should be available at Amazon UK before Christmas for around £50.

Oh — and it has a super feature: pressing Select and Start together instantly toggles in the on-screen keyboard, to enter high scores or search for an app to launch. It’s an extremely welcome feature to anyone that’s used an iCade, which lacks such functionality.

iControlPad

The Gametel controller isn’t the only news from the iOS controller scene. The OpenPandora folks behind the iControlPad have been busy working on firmware updates to better the experience of iOS gamers.

Remember, back in the review of the iControlPad, how I mentioned that only jailbroken iOS devices and other platforms could utilize the sweet, dual analog nubs on the iControlPad? Well, I’m happy to have been proven wrong. Now, it’s not as wonderful a scenario as if Apple had begun allowing the type of iOS Bluetooth pairing that an HID device with a set of analog sticks really needs. No. Instead, the iControlPad firmware developers created a new interface mode called “special packet mode” in the latest test firmware that sends the coordinates of the two analog nubs as strings of characters — from the perspective of an iOS device, they’re being sent by a keyboard. It’s a pretty awesome workaround in the face of an Apple restriction that we truly wish the company would see fit to dissolve, and it lets legitimate games in the App Store take advantage of physical analog controllers.

A perfect example of this mode in action is Warner Skoch’s Vertex Blaster [App Store], a space shooter in the vein of (a retro and rather simplified) Super Stardust HD that we’ve not covered directly, but that has a lengthy thread in our forums where readers are enjoying it. It was in the OpenPandora forums that we learned of this little gem. Have a look at a fan video showing iControlPad analog nub gameplay on an iPad. (The video also shows D-pad play of Super Mega Worm.)

Oh, and that pop-in-the-onscreen-keyboard trick the Gametel unit brings — the iControlPad, with the latest test firmware, has that as well (it just takes a few more seconds of button-holding to kick in).

iCade

So, with all this exciting news about the Gametel controller and the analog stick support from App Store games for the iControlPad, I went ahead and contacted ThinkGeek to see if there is anything exciting on the horizon for the iCade. It turns out that while, sadly, the pop-up-keyboard trick isn’t a planned thing for the iCade right now, I did glean, from extremely vague terms, that there may be some interesting things to come in the iCade’s future. No specifics, unfortunately, but it’s something we’ll keep an eye on.

And there you have it — a round-up of physical controller news. The introduction of a new controller, the Gametel unit, will only sweeten the proposition for developers to support for such devices in their games down the road, and that’s definitely a good thing for iOS gamers. Stay tuned for more controller news as it unfolds.

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No one can deny that the advent of Angry Birds made a permanent change to the way people saw iOS gaming. Since its debut in December 2009, the simple bird-launching game has made approximately 27 boatloads of money, and continues to rake it in with merchandise sales such as plushies and more. Naturally, other designers were bound to try to imitate the formula and appeal to the gamers who were hopelessly addicted to hurling birds at pigs. And with that, clones were born.

Snappy Dragons [99¢/Lite/HD/Lite HD] is an Angry Birds clone, through and through. But I have to clarify, because at this point in the post-Angry Birds landscape, there are many different categories of clones, so it’s essential to explain what exactly you’re getting into. Well, aside from throwing stuff at other stuff.

Snappy Dragons has a very simple premise, just like the game it’s inspired by: Evil wizards have kidnapped adorable baby dragons, and it’s up to you to save them. To do so, you’ll need to progress through a series of levels (80 in total across four different worlds) that present the basic challenge of taking out the wizards and saving the baby dragons. Luckily, you have a handful of fireballs at your disposal, so that helps your quest considerably. You also get to choose which dragon you play out of four, which has pretty much no effect on the actual game but hey, you look cool.

As you progress through the levels, new challenges will be introduced such as dragon cages which you can destroy for extra points. Controls are responsive when it comes to aiming your fireballs and trying to nail the perfect arc, and its still fun to make your way through the levels. It all feels familiar, which is probably because the formula is shamelessly copied from Angry Birds, but if you crave more of that gameplay, you will certainly enjoy making your way through Snappy Dragons.

There are also bonus levels sprinkled throughout the game too, which help to break up the level-by-level formula and let you go on a wizard-killing rampage. It’s strangely satisfying to never run out of fireballs, as they are limited in all the regular gameplay levels.

The game has a cheery feel and the art style is perky, with wide eyed dragon babies blinking innocently while they wait for you to save their lives. It’s nothing that you’ll rave to your friends about, but you will likely enjoy it in that way that a familiar thing can be rewarding (kind of like my shaming and horrible addiction to all Zuma games). It also has built in Facebook and Twitter support, so while you may not need to rave about how unique Snappy Dragons is, you can at least brag about your high scores to your friends. And since bragging seems to be a golden quality among most gamers, it’s sure to please those of you who enjoy doing so.

TouchArcade Rating:

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This week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show is an awesome one because it sees the return of The Bearded One, Jared Nelson, after his Grand European Adventure. At the top, we talk about the sights, sounds, and tastes of Mordor, Germany, Paris and other exotic places. Somehow, we find the time to talk about games later on, but when we do, we cover a lot of bases. Topics include the next iPhone, the latest video game releases, Kindle Fire, and your e-mails.

If you’d like to give this a listen, go ahead by clicking that link just below. If you’d like to save a piece of us on your hard drive (and who wouldn’t) while also getting the next ‘cast the second it’s uploaded you, you should really grab us on iTunes and Zune.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-019.mp3, 41MB

Here are your show notes. We’ll be back this Monday with another awesome bonus episode, and of course, this coming Friday with another regularly scheduled show. Send us an e-mail while you wait, by the way: podcast@toucharcade.com.

GAMES!

Eli Note: This is the European pizza bag technology I mentioned.

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So, Amazon let the cat out of the bag this morning and announced its low-cost and full-color seven inch tablet, Kindle Fire (and a less relevant-to-our-interests new touch-centric Kindle). Fire is an Android-powered device, though you wouldn't recognize that fact from its UI alone. It’ll hook into Amazon's cloud, be able to stream Amazon movies from its download service and, just like the Kindle, connect with Amazon’s rich e-books store, but the one thing that really caught our attention was, of course, the promise of games.

At the press event held today, Amazon’s demo Kindle Fire had a pre-loaded icon for Angry Birds, heavily suggesting that Rovio Mobile’s property will debut with yet another tablet computer this year. After the event, Amazon opened up its Kindle Fire advertisement page, displaying Angry Birds Rio, Plants vs. Zombies, Cut the Rope, Doodle Jump, and even Peggle on the device. That page states that every app that touches the device will be “Amazon tested on Kindle Fire for the best experience possible.” The Fire has a 16-million color display, a resolution of 169 pixels per inch, and it runs on a dual-core CPU. No camera or 3G, though.

Fire will hit this November 15 at $199 — a price that, if the device turns out to be good, gives potential owners a legitimate low-cost option to play Android games. This is an opportunity we haven’t really seen yet from an actual company with chops in the tablet space (excluding the HP Touchpad ridiculousness), so we’ll definitely keep our eyes on Fire as it grows and hopefully becomes the iOS-y platform that Amazon wants it to be. Also, it plays Angry Birds, guys! Whoo!

[Via Gizmodo, Engadget]

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