I'm a big fan of car racing games. In fact, I'll be more specific - I'm a big fan of car racing simulations - anything with power ups, cartoon characters, missiles or trucks coming the other way, turns me off completely. I want realism, I want petrol fumes, I want adrenaline, I want to feel like I'm pulling 5G going round a fast corner. Which is a tall order on an electronic device - though Real Racing seems to have got most of the way there on iOS. The closest thing Windows Phone has so far is the Red Bull promotional F1 simulation here - does it compare, is it any fun, is it realistic, is it value for money? Let's find out.
What happens if you squish a Rubik's style sliding puzzle into a hexagon based grid, throw on various potential moves into the individual tiles in the grid, and ask players to slide the tiles around to get coloured hexagons to target squares? Apart from a huge headache, you get HexArray!
No, not Metro UI on Windows Phone, but the UK based free newspaper! It's one of the recent success stories of print newspapers, and now a daily commute would not be out of place in the UK capital without a copy of Metro. So does its Windows Phone application revolutionise news-reading on your smartphone? Perhaps not, but it does bring some nice tricks and tools to the table, and that's enough for me to recommend it.
Microsoft rolls out another free Xbox Live title, and asks you to blow a little flower around for 50 gamer points. It's not going to revolutionise gaming, but it is free. The question is this, is Breeze a worthy addition to the main Windows Phone gaming brand? I'm not so sure.
When you have such a strong game as "Doodle Jump" that's recognised on the streets, to have another Xbox game called "Doodle God" risks association in the mind of the users. It's a strange call to make when naming a game, even though there is no exclusivity implied in the word. Doodle God has no jumping, no platform action, and only the very vaguest hints of a time limit. It's very much a cerebral puzzle game that you play over a long time, and it has a huge amount of goodwill online. I just can't see why.
I remember getting into heated debate in 2009 around the pros and cons of resistive vs capacitive touchscreens - one of the biggest pros for 'resistive' was that phones like the Nokia N97 and 5800 could be used with gloves on, out in cold weather. Over the next year, the market swayed decisively towards capacitive technology, and rightly so, but now we have an accessory that brings back gloved, cold weather use to all capacitive-screened smartphones...
For various reasons, the YouTube client built into Windows Phone by Microsoft is not the greatest of clients. Being little more than a wrapper for the mobile website version of YouTube, there's a lot of functionality missing from it. And when you have an opportunity like this on a mobile device, the developers are going to step up to the plate and have a swing. If you're looking, you'll have already found MetroTube. For everyone else, read on.
The Radar is HTC's latest sub-4" Windows Phone 7 device. While being yet another touch slab, the Radar's design and specifications offer subtle differences to others in its class. From its premium build quality and 3.8" display (as opposed to the usual 3.7") to its non-replaceable battery and lack of digital compass, there is plenty to talk about. Not to mention the suite of HTC exclusive applications. Read on to find out more.
I have to admire the imagination of some developers when they come up with their plot lines. Take Krashlander, a fascinating physics-based puzzle game where you are asked to... ski down a mountain and crash into some evil, yet horrifically immobile, robots. Love it. Plot aside, does Krashlander make as good a game as it would a script for Doctor Who?
There has always been a place for games with very basic controls, especially in the mobile gaming space. The "one button" game is almost a genre in itself, where you have a character running from something, and have to time the press of that button to get out the way of the obstacles in time. Tsotsi is definitely in that genre, but it doubles the complexity on offer to the user. It has two buttons!
