Yes it's another vertical shooter, a genre that demands solid controls, a smooth gradient curve, the ability to keep everything legible, and to put a lot of graphics on the screen while not having any frame rate issues in terms of stuttering or slowing down of the action. The Visiting of Turjah might not have the speed, but she's got it where it counts.
One of the classic arcade games is Qix, where you have to move your cursor around, creating rectangles and filling up the playing field. Hit a pre-defined percentage and you'll clear the level. The key is to do that safely and not be killed. But can it be updated for a smartphone and changed from rectangles to circles? Bubble Filler is about to answer that question.
Bejeweled 2? After all this time, only now does it get a review? Yep, and that's for two reasons. The first is the rather obvious "we haven't done it yet" and the second is that there may have been many java versions from EA, there might have been a raft of clones that have come close, but this is the licenced Popcap version, with the "HD" optimised for Symbian tag, and given the playing field of the Ovi Store, I suspect this is the one that many people will flock to.
If you’re a budding explorer or have a taste for history, then Extreme North might be the title for you. It’s more than a game, it’s an interactive history lesson. Filled with short text passages and mini-games, you are taken on a voyage of discovery about Arctic exploration in both the 16th and 19th centuries. Read on to find out whether this is one history lesson that can overcome the attention span of the online generation.
Gedda Headz starts with an interesting premise, take a bundle of two player mini games on a smartphone, and pit the whole world against each other in a massive multiplayer game where people can earn reputation, improve the strength of their character (which is, naturally, a head) and buy new accessories and heads to help in the game. Give it all some balance, so new players can have a fair crack at the whip if challenged by an old-timer, and then roll it out as a huge social network/game hybrid. And it almost works.
As a maths scholar myself, I do love it when some of it ripples through into the real world. In this case it's Cam Measure, written in Qt for Symbian touch devices, based around one of the simplest mathematical constructs of all - the right angled triangle. Armed with a camera and accelerometer-equipped smartphone, you've then got the basis of a system for measuring distances and heights - all without actually moving from your current position. That's the theory, anyway!
Given that smartphones have supplanted PDAs, they need to be up to every sort of PIM duty, including note taking. While Symbian has the venerable Notes application, it’s something of a data silo. That is, unless you are fortunate enough to use and understand SyncML services. For those who don’t even know what those are, then perhaps SymNote by Talv Bansal will be of interest. It’s a note taking application which synchronises to the SimpleNote cloud service. Read on for our review.
Despite being programmed by "STeVE's Apps" this little utility is nothing to do with me - honest! What it is, is a simple and useful imitation of a spirit level, to aid in getting those all important work surfaces, shelves and cupboards level. It's not flashy and it's not perfect, but it's still a solid little app to keep up your smartphone sleeve.
It's a small software scene, but the "recording your exercise on your smartphone" genre has been joined by AllSport GPS. Offering a similar mix of monitoring, logging and statistics to applications like Sports Tracker, can Trimble Outdoor's client match one of my long term favourites? In terms of function, yes, but the form is lacking.
Video LAN Client, known as VLC, is the Swiss Army Knife of multimedia applications. Capable of playing just about anything, as well as streaming to other devices and transcoding, there’s little it can’t do. However, there are times when you don’t want to be glued to the keyboard while watching videos. That’s where VLC Remote for Symbian comes in. With this application, you can kick back and relax with Symbian in hand to take charge of your viewing experience. Read on to see how well it works.
