There are numerous “courses” which are varied layouts of the cards. Each one is referred to a a hole, and your solitaire moves are shots. A golf bag provided will hold utility “clubs” which are spare cards that you can employ when there is nothing on the table that you can match your drawn cards with. When you clear the board of all cards your score may be an Eagle or a double eagle, or a perfect. If one or more cards are left behind then you may get a birdie or just make par. If not there are bogeys.

Then the gophers show up. They laugh at your bad moves, as does the sound effects of a disappointed crowd… The gophers also attempt to distract you when concentrating. You can whack them, and obtain some points as revenge though.

The game is simple, and unique. In that goofy way that only golf can be. It’s addictive, and infuriating. It redoes an old standard, and somehow managed to snare me in. One night until 2:30 am. Or it could have been the iced tea. Either way, you can place a good deal of it for free, and if you get caught up in it, the full version is inexpensive.

You are given a store, and a starting budget of ten thousand dollars. The gameplay takes place largely of hidden object puzzles. You are shown several locations throughout the country. At each place there is a series of hidden objects and puzzles to solve. It taunts your memory to match objects in pairs or find parts and put them together. One guy collects sporting goods, there is an old lady with victorian objects. There is a geek kid with movie memorabilia and other collectibles, and one hella creepy guy that has medical equipment and a strange collection of oddities.

Also similar to the TV shows, you have the options to consult an expert before buying, Or to restore the objects to get a better price for them. The game permits you to negotiate with the vendors, and they have a red to green slider bar that indicates their attitude towards you. If you keep them happy you may make better deals. When you ate out on the road, you will get calls on your iPhone, and a woman – who is so not Danielle Colby, will give you a list of things to pick for customers, which is usually hidden objects. Certain groups of objects may be hot sellers at different times, automotive, artifacts, or movie collectibles might be the hot items of the day, and when you pick those you get bonuses. Of you do well on negotiating that can also generate more bonuses of cash.

The auctioneer speaks a language that sounds like simlish. It is fun to translate his mumbling into colorful metaphors that it sounds like he may be saying. The game is addictive, humorous and fun. For the price it is wholesome and challenging, and you may learn something. It is definitely well worth buying.

Since it is based on a familiar game there is no learning curve. Anyone can pick it up and play. When you complete a line or row of 10 squares horizontally then it destroys the whole line. Once the blocks match up across the board, they disappear. When they are all gone or you have made a deep enough pathway through them a pretty gem falls down, and the Krocos can have their meal.

It has a charming theme of gems and fairies. The main characters are little baby crocodiles who consume gems. When you move the blocks around sparkly glitter stars come up. Over all there is lots of color and the design seems to be tailored for girls and women.

Two game modes are featured. Playing the Story Mode has 40 levels. Once you have played through it, other options will open up. For more of a challenge you can put it into Classic Mode where there are five difficulty settings. Simple games such as this can prove to be addicting, and Kroco Gems might just get you hooked.

Even though it crashes fairly often on the original16G iPad running iOS 5, it runs like a bat straight out of hell on the new iPad2. It’s resource heavy, similarly to Infinity Blade, one of many things that it has in common with the hack and slash fighter, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Take the gorgeously gruesome graphics that resemble Infinity Blade, banged together with the horrid Alchemilla hospital and some of the sound cues from the original Silent Hill, and you’ve got a spooky stew there.

You wake up sideways in this madhouse, and need to escape it. You fight off very well rendered enemies that range from goat headed baphomets, to winged phalus flap-heads, to gooey, fleshy jabbas. A few ghosts, specters and other diaphanous beings haunt you. You aren’t defenseless either, but what I wouldn’t do for a trusty fireball to chuck at some of these beastly baddies.

You do get swords and cross bows which you can upgrade, using the gold that you find inexplicably hidden practically everywhere around the game. Although loot is great fun, the clues tend only to be paper notes and clippings which aren’t very exciting. There could be a better variety of items hidden. The swords all have interesting names and attributes that help to pump up your character’s stats. You are given skill points as you level up to apply to any area that you want to improve.

Environments are dark, creepy and disgusting. It’s the perfect setting for a windy fall night. Putting head phones on, and curling up with the iPad in a dark candlelit room is the venue I suggest for this game. Thank goodness there aren’t any spiders – so far… You’ll see bloodstains, and burst open coffins, contrasting with areas that are filled with sunlight. As you go down the dim hallways you can choose unlocked rooms to enter. Those with a Sun motif painted on the doors are free of infestations, where you’ll find gold, First Aid Kits and clues. There is even a sun filled area in the courtyard with a treasure chest sitting out in the open.

This does beg the question as to why the character can’t just tear through some of the flimsy wood, and leave? As well as why thieves have taken away every TV, computer and telephone, but left heaps of gold and gems lying around as well as more bags of gold, draped casually here and there. I don’t think that there is anyplace on earth that is so haunted or cursed which would stop gold diggers from stripping the building down to it’s nuts and bolts if they thought there was any gold there.

You won’t mind suspending your disbelief for this great effort from from Phosphor Games Studio. It takes elements of other games and redoes them quite well. The demons are each a small masterpiece of design, lifted partially from old woodcuts of witchcraft books.

The old man in the wheelchair seems like a suspicious person, who says that he’ll help your character escape, but I don’t tend to believe him. The mad man’s voice over the intercom that was so jarring and innovative in the original Bioshock doesn’t help much in this game. The voice, though it adds to the story, detracts from the immersion into the game. I found myself wishing he would shut the hell up. The ambient soundtrack is pretty good and the music seems to come and go.

The main game play is the first-person battles with demons. The up close sword fighting is almost identical to Infinity Blade’s fight system. You can dodge attacks. If you tap the shield in the center of the screen your character will guard, blocking a blow and then actually telling you to ‘Attack Now” for an optimal hit. Which you do by slashing ‘X’s’ over the enemy on screen.

There is a decent amount of exploration outside of combat. Navigation is a bit too tight so far. You move in a chess-like fashion by touching glowing hotspots. It would be better in both this and Infinity Blade, if your character could run and jump freely inside the terrain. I suppose that is coming, only hindered by how much jazz is under the hood of these iPads.

Dark Meadow’s strength is the tremendous production values. It really was exciting to see a developer like Phosphor Games come along and make perfect use of the Unreal Engine. I’m glad to say I predicted it back when there was just the Unreal Engine demo of Epic Citadel last year.

Another point is the value. At the price of a moderate game App I all ready got more hours of gameplay out of this than the sixty dollar PS3 game that I reviewed last time. A plus is that we can play it on all three of the iPads if we want to, although there is no co-op, and you are playing a new game on each device you have it on, I would have liked it to be able to be synched through Game Center. A female avatar choice would be nice. :/

The intriguing story keeps you playing, wondering “WTF?”, the entire time, making it a mystery that you may not be able to put down easily. The tweaks I’m mentioning don’t make it any less fun to play. They are all gimmies, and ‘gimme more’, means I’m greedy about a great game with potential to continue to develop more. It’s an absorbing Halloween entertainment. I give Dark Meadow 9 severed hands clapping out of 10.

Steve Jobs The Crazy Ones

I hate you Death! Fuck you hard Death! The place where my writing mojo comes from is deep down at soul level. It exists right next to the depression section in my psyche. I’ve been in mourning.

I haven’t written a word in two weeks. Almost two years ago my older brother, an expert hiker “fell” off a cliff and died in a freak hiking accident. That uber-nerd older brother was my geek mentor. I’ve mentioned him in several places in this blog. Apple’s soap opera story, and inventions were something that my brother and I bonded over throughout the years. So Death got him. And then George Carlin, and now of course Steve Jobs. This trinity of brainiacs keeps forming into a visual of a black and white tattoo of the three of them.

“Oh where, oh where have all the smart people gone?” I can’t get the line from Pink’s Bush era lament, Stupid Girls, out of my brain. Yes, I know that the new smart people are out there, but you are half my age and one of my boobs is probably the size of your head. It isn’t always about what’s good, as you will one day find, it’s what you grew up with. Maybe all this pain is good for song writing, and there’s an App for that… Ah, see what I mean?

I grew up along with Apple. Steve Jobs has always been inside my computer. Not just the code, but the covenant of understanding between a person that you know and trust, which was what made Apple different from IBM and Microsoft. Steve, and his belief system permeated what I have always felt from my Macs is a rudimentary artificial intelligence. The “ghost” if you will, in the machine. Job’s computer liberalism as perhaps a real world precursor that might lead to a philosophy something like Azimov’s Three Laws. From iMac to iPad to Wall-e, benevolent, cheerful hoppy icon-ed little friends came from Apple, not just cold devices.

There is Woz. He still lives. I will make sure that I have him on my Twitter and look up whatever else he is doing. I’m slowly picking up my geek pieces. As disheartened as I may feel in that empty mojo place next to my soul, there are fun PS3 games to review. There’s a brand new iPad 2, that has become very sentimental suddenly, to explore the world with. I’ll go on, continuing to look for that spark of true genius in the next computer Lama whomever he or she may be. Yep, I will geek on. I, robot?

Not many people are still around that really understand what Liberal Arts means the way that Steve Jobs at Apple did. His gift was not only design and marketing, but the code that was underlying OS X, and earlier versions. He was someone who truly believed in art for art’s sake. And privacy for privacy’s sake. His code kept us Mac users safe from cyber attacks for years.

Instead of a futuristic libertarian society that you find in game worlds like Second Life or in TV series like Star Trek the Next Generation. We get soulless leaders like Mark Zuckerberg which leads to corrupt technology like Facebook. Even Bill Gates, once the worlds wealthiest man paid his karmic debt for stealing the dirty operating system by becoming a philanthropist. But will the next generation of technology gurus be so ethically minded?

We are moving closer to an Idiocracy, yes like the movie. Education cuts made by the Republicans led to the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranking the American kids 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics. Where have all the smart people gone? If we thought the two thousands would be the beginning of the space age we were grossly optimistic. NASA is scrapped. On both extremes we have irationality and shared equally by both sides. The ridiculous and stupid Tea Party is loud, ignorant, and self contradictory. Smart, sophisticated Anonymous is cerebral, sometimes misguided, and so far ineffective at achieving lasting change.

As Jobs embarks upon his well deserved retirement I’m mourning the end of an era. His stocks have finally surpassed his old rival Gates. Apple even finally won some patent lawsuits. Steve Jobs’s only missed calling would have been to run for president of the USA on an Apple Party.

CEO Steve Jobs, who will now take a leave of absence to take care of his health, said it was strong sales across the board that pushed the numbers into company record territory. But it isn’t all about the money, not entirely. It’s Jobs’ leadership that has Apple addicts concerned for the future. For as long as I can remember the next big thing has come from Steve Jobs. It started with what he did with Steve Wozniack’s invention. Then they wrote the software that made an office inside of a box, the personal computer. He invented the desk top system, windowed menus, and the mouse. The 1999 iMacs came in colors and caused a revolution on office accessories. Suddenly everything from the floor-mats, to desks, and everything on the desk and in it was neon grape, strawberry, lime or blueberry. The early 2000′s were transparent and fruit colored.

It’s Job’s visions that we need. Weather it is his alter ego as Wall-e zipping around with an ancient iPod, or his revolutionizing the music industry. Or finally making peace with the Beatles. If it weren’t for him we wouldn’t have all these things that we didn’t know we needed and now cannot do without. To the point where we say, if “he or she had an iPhone they would not have” fill in your choice of disaster here.

Although there were several other members of the original Homebrew club none of them made it quite as spectacularly as Jobs. Wozniack and his subsequent inventions after the computer haven’t been on the radar nearly as much. It reminds me of something that comedian Lewis Black said “Some how we got from Bob Hope to me in my life time”. With the passing of the guard of that era, which included brainiac George Carlin, the future of technology may be in the hands of lady luck.

Many of the people writing those articles are just too young to remember when Apple Computers began in a garage. Even though  the original founders of Apple, Steve Jobs a  software engineer, and Steve Wozniak the inventor of the personal computer respectively, have evaded the ‘dark lord’ reputation that Bill Gates acquired, they did have some techno – karma to repay.

Nowadays people may regard The Beatles as some lordly muses of musicology, and refer to them in awed tones. Or they may indeed fail to see the relevance of the band entirely, even though Rock Band sales of their music has done well. Perhaps fewer still remember that The Beatles were not rock gods at first for many years after they began. Certainly not everyone in the sixties thought that The Beatles music was all that good. Several other bands of the era had enormous followings and in fact still do. The first rumblings of metal would soon reverberate across the pond as well.

Today some might even say that it was the press, and the particular way that crowds were filmed, which made The Beatles package seem like it was a bigger phenomenon than it actually was. Regardless of your interpretation of the biblical amount of Beatles history, the acquiescence of the ‘other’ Apple signals not only a truce, but the sunset of a fifty year era.

Apple and Apple reaching across the aisle has more significance than just a mere economics lesson. It is the death of a particular zeitgeist. The sixties, heralded as America’s creative, flower strewn past is fifty years gone by. Michael Jackson who at one time The Beatles publishing rights, has passed on. Over time, The Beatles franchise is no longer guaranteed success with the next generations. Musical tastes change. Exclusivity, and keeping the songs off online distribution meant dwindling into obscurity.

During those early  not – so – popular years The Beatles attempted to start their own rudimentary brand. The Beatle’s Apple grew in the1960s to replace a first failed attempt, called Beatles Ltd. They produced some records as Apple, with the green granny smith apple spinning in the middle of the vinyl. But that didn’t last long and they changed labels. You could say that a green apple and a rainbow apple are not the same thing. One was a graphic design, and the other was a fruit photo. Apple Corp. might sound like a different enough name from Apple Computers but it wasn’t.

Beginning in the late seventies when I was in high school and college, I remember well all the disputes between the two Apple companies over their trademarks rights. Those legal battles continued right up to 2007.

As a condition of the settlement, in 1981 Apple Computer agreed not to enter the music business, and Apple Corps agreed not to enter the computer business. However as time went by and technology grew, computers used music for games, MIDI and audio-recording. Many game franchises that are still going on today began on the Apple II, which was the first to have an Ensoniq synthesizer chip. So in 1989 they were all back in court.

The legal battles stalled the advancement of music technology. Who knows, something like iTunes might have come a couple years sooner. As late as 2003 Apple Corp. was suing Apple due to the use of an Apple on iTunes. Finally in 2006 the court ruled in favor of Apple Computer. It was time for Apple Corp. to get over it. There was just no way that The Beatles defunct company logo had any reality as infringing on iTunes, which they never could have imagined back in the sixties.

The settlements ended the ongoing trademark lawsuits between the two mega companies. Hands Across the Water. It must have been tough for guys who were Beatles music fans, to accidentally get screwed repeatedly to the tune of millions of dollars and years stalling the advancement of technology. To be so embroiled in multi million dollar money pits against The Beatles management company, is ironic today. If you need to check a logo for copyrights, you can look it up online. Those legendary garage geeks need to use a time machine, and tell themselves to invent the Internet at the same time as the PC. One thing is for sure, we can expect more of The Beatles music on future Apple Computer press roll outs.