Following on from Dots Master, developer Noam Behar brings another classic pencil and paper game to Windows Phone. Mega Tic Tac Toe continues the real-world look, and brings an engrossing challenge to gamers on the Windows Phone platform.
Here we go, it's another application to help you browse and read through your RSS feed. Pheeb works with the Feedly common platform, is brightly coloured and well laid out, but falls to make the grade for frequent use.
A clever mash-up between the constant running genre and the likes of first person shooters like Doom and Quake, Into the Dead is finely balanced gameplay. Very finely balanced. On a knife edge - for some it will be all the zombie killing they crave for just the initial purchase price, for others the groundswell of extra in-app-purchases will prove rather more expensive.
It shouldn't surprise me that the classics are usually tarted up in any mobile app store, but it means that when I do find a game intro that hooks me, I'm going to get a little surprise when I realise "I know this!". Such is the case with Boxed In, AE's latest release for Windows Phone. Ready for the spoiler? It's Sokobahn.
Let’s put aside the fantastic plot of finding a room full of an infinite supply of ‘Voyager’ probes and the rockets to launch them, and simply enjoy the game. Your goal is very altruistic, to gather as much information as possible as your Voyager spacecraft flies past the various planets of the solar system. You set the departure angle from Earth, you set the level of thrust, and celestial mechanics will take care of the rest.
In the early days of Windows Phone, third party camera applications were the saviour of the determined snapper, offering far more than the Microsoft-written default application. Yet most Lumias now have Nokia Camera, with its truly pro-level interface. Begging the question: "Do we still need third party camera apps?" In truth, nowhere near as much, but ProShot here does have some unique tricks up its sleeve that might well endear it.
Vine was launched in January 2013 by Twitter, and since then it has racked up users, videos, infamy, and a few third-party Windows Phone clients. Vine's official client for Microsoft's mobile platform arrived in November, has had a few updates, and now Ewan asks if the app is ready to record your six seconds of a close-up.
If you can get over the compression artefacts in the music, smartphones are really good devices to listen to audio on. Radio stations are slowly catching up and providing online streams for their mobile fans to listen to. The UK Radioplayer's self-titled application brings you a huge number of UK based radio stations to your handset, but does the industry's solution deliver? It certainly manages on the audio front but the app does have a few issues.
There are certain games that should be regarded as staples for any computing platform. Just as every Christmas you'll find an orange at the bottom of your stocking, just as every student party there is a bottle of absinth nobody will risk opening until 3am, every smartphone needs a decent version of Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Mahjong. Just after Christmas (great timing there...) Microsoft released these three titles under the Xbox Live brand, and I'm going to start off the reviews by looking at Mahjong.
The Lumia 1020 makes a great Windows Phone flagship but there's arguably one major feature left out - Qi wireless charging, as featured in the Lumia 920 over a year ago. The Qi coils add about a millimetre to a phone design, which is presumably why they were omitted on the 1020, but as I've enthused before, wireless charging utterly transforms the way I use my smartphone, which is why I was very glad to get my hands on the official 'Wireless Charging Shell' and bring my 1020 well and truly into 2014.
