Alien Glyphs - Have you ever visited a foreign county where you did not know the language? Did you spend your days trying to decipher the encrypted codes on street signs and store-front windows? Imagine now, that your life depended on your ability to recognize these strange symbols, to somehow match the disparate shapes into pairs as you passed them on the street at an ever-increasing pace. This is the gist of Alien Glyphs.

Alien Glyphs, the puzzle-based arcade app from Viacheslav Klimon, is a fast-paced matching game. Glyphs — alien glyphs to be precise — slide into view at the top of the screen and you must find it’s mate from the control panel below. The control panel contains a dozen or more glyphs depending on which level your on. As you get deeper into the game, the glyphs also come faster and become more complex. Read the rest of this entry »

Super Juicy - If you think  you’re done playing match-3 games, think again. If you think all match-3 apps are just the same game with a different wrapper, think again. If you’ve ever enjoyed a match-3 game, then don’t pass go, just buy Super Juicy.

Super Juicy is bringing a new kind of action to the popular genre started by Bejeweled. The point is still to match like objects, but instead of jewels or parrots Super Juicy is all about the bubbles, baby. Moving bubbles that float, squeeze and grow in an ever-changing dance that kept me engaged for all 38 levels.

One of the things that makes Super Juicy so fun is Read the rest of this entry »

Team Alpha is a shoot-em-up, action game where, according to Sad Cat Software, your task “is to eradicate all mutants in a government lab where a secret biological experiment has gone awry.” The app offers nearly 200 rooms of mutant-shooting mania with big guns. Good times.

You’ll get a top-down view as you navigate from room to room. The graphics are crisp, with your typical monsters and mutants color scheme.

Runnin’ and gunnin’ isn’t usually my thing, so I was concerned that I would have a tough time testing Team Alpha. To my surprise, the dual-dial controls were really intuitive. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: This Review has been updated to correct a factual error.)

Picto-Mail — Emoji are all the rage, but not everyone has the ability to see the miniature pictograms. Sure there are plenty of apps to unlock emoji on your iPhone, but what about your non-iPhone buddies?

If you consider this a dilemma, then Picto-Mail wants to solve your problem. Picto-Mail is an email program that uses “pictos,” or icons, to replace 2,500 common words. After you type a message, Picto-Mail will scan your text and any words it recognizes will be replaced with a picto.

The resulting message can be cute or confusing. If you’re familiar with the iconography, then it’s a fun way to send a semi-encoded message. Read the rest of this entry »

In spite of Apple’s rumblings about duplicating functionality, every so often an app squeezes by that seems remarkably similar to the built-in apps that come installed on every iPhone.

MyPlaylists is one of those apps. The app plays music and lets you browse your music library to create new playlists. The big difference between MyPlaylists and the iPod app already installed is that users can create unlimited new playlists — rather than one very limited “on-the-go” playlist.

It’s a straightforward process — how hard can it be to build a list of favorite songs. Read the rest of this entry »