"I can feel a great disturbance in the freemium Force", I thought as I opened up the Windows Store last night. And the wallpaper in the app confirmed it. A familiar blocky face, a stylised logo... Nimblebit has finally arrived as a Windows Phone developer, and brought their management apps to the platform. But hold on, Tiny Death Star?
Amazingly, Asphalt 7 has slipped under our collective reviewing radars... until now. Gameloft's second Asphalt game on Windows Phone and the Xbox Live banner (after Asphalt 5 - for some reason Asphalt 6 has been skipped over) is a stunning tour de force of fast graphics, accurate controls, and rather a lot of adrenaline.
While Windows Phone has a functional Twitter component through the People hub, the majority of tweeters will want something with more functionality. As Twitter continues to lock down the ecosystem and pull everyone into their website and official apps, there is still a place for a well put together third party client. Could that be Tweet It?
How about a platform game that's trapped inside a technical drawing? A game that is as challenging as it is artistic? And a game that the iOS and Android clans would love to have on their platform. Well tough, 'The Machine' is ours!
Now we finally have the official word on an Instagram app (thanks to Stephen Elop's keynote at Nokia World this week), we know we only have to wait 'a few weeks' to have the client from Facebook's social network for images. But Instagram fans on Windows Phone have long known that Rudy Huyn's third party client, 6tag, is the way to go to interact with Instagram on your handset.
I don't think I've ever had to review an accessory that's so well built, so effective and yet.... so inelegant. This is Mugen's extended battery solution for the Nokia Lumia 920 - you'll recognise the company's name from a hundred other (equally bulbous) extended batteries for a hundred other phones over the years. However, what makes the '3000mAh Battery Case' so inelegant isn't the heft or thicker lines, unusually. And it's not exactly Mugen's fault. Nor is it, surprisingly, a complete showstopper, as I'll explain.
Since it was reviewed around this time last year, MetroSpec has continued to be improved, with new code asked for by interested parties, bug fixes for the countless options and configurations available to the app, and of course the addition of elements that developer Glenn Edwards has added to the app, a labour of love and one of the best ZX Spectrum emulators for Windows Phone.
Rule The Kingdom, from Game Insight, has a difficult task to manage. The developers have set out to make a huge sprawling RPG, that can be played not just for a few days, or a few weeks, but for months. Skipping to the end, they have achieved that, but if you were to strip out the timers that encourage you to pay into this freemium title, you might be able to complete every quest in the kingdom in about nine days.
CJ stands for City Jumper, and CJ: Strike Back from developers Droidhen takes the infinite running genre and mixes it with a bit of retro styling to provide a comforting action game that's quick to play, but perhaps a bit too heavy in the revenue generation for a free title.
With so much focus placed on music by the modern smartphone there's a fundamental issue that can muddy the waters, namely the gap between the handset and your ears. The speakers on a handset are mostly okay, the bundled headsets won't do a bad job, but if you love your music you're going to switch to something else. And one option is the Sabotage Royale headset from Degauss Labs.
