If you are an anime fan and you’ve watched Saki or Nana and wondered what the heck was up with Mah Jong, it isn’t easy to find out. Mah Jong isn’t just a match two solitaire game. It’s a complex poker like game that originated in China. These days the Japanese version of the game is the most complicated and most incomprehensible. In my quest to understand manga and anime I’ve gone to many lengths in the past. I’ve attempted to learn to read kanji and hiragana and learn the Japanese language. For mah jong I’ve had to learn to read the characters for numbers 1-9, the four seasons, and the four directions. I’ve read several books on the game and spent hours online playing various versions of mah jong against bots and computer AI. Read more

This is the third edition of the popular music game from Tapulous.  It works like Amplitude did on the old PS2. The game is so much better these days on the touch screen of the iPod Touches. There is an avatar you can customize and it looks like this music game married Mees from PC.  The tactile sensation from the game resembles the fingering of a guitar. The falling balls and droplets which you need to tap in time to the music as they reach a target aren’t always mapped to the guitar though. Each and song is different, and the musical target jumps around within the song from percussion, drums, vocals, bass and occasionally guitars too.
Without the friction of a DS or the resistance of hard wound guitar strings to cut your fingers,tapping along to the music is fun and seems natural. There are no blisters from playing a real instrument, and no extra junk in your living room, like big plastic fake guitars. Listening to the music with ear buds or head phones is good. It’s a fun way to check out new music. There are many tracks which seemed to have been generated by a house band for the game. But there are many licensed tracks by well known artists. Read more

Make your own animation

Looking at the trailer featuring Marilyn Manson and scanning the top reviews on Google for Dragon Age : Origins led me, and perhaps you as well to take a look at the game. I rented it, and I hope you did too. Here was a game with a good pedigree from Bioware. Expectations were high for this, perhaps it would be as good or better than Oblivion. No. Not even close. Read more

This new MMO from NCSoft made it’s debut in the fall of ‘09. You can find several articles about it here on the site. I’ve been playing it for a while now and I am still enjoying it enough to recommend it. If you got a new PC recently and you are looking for something fun to play then this might be it. We gave Aion Best Female Avatar for ‘09 and Best MMO. Now that the tinsel is settled it’s a good time to take a look at the game overall and it has scored very high. Read more

In this intricate mobile platformer you play as Sun Wukong who is an ugly little Monkey King. Despite the unpleasant character model the rest of the game is beautiful. The artstyle is like Okami. Game play is designed around a caligraphy gimick. You’ll draw lines to create clouds for the monkey to glide to. The pace of the game takes some getting used to but once you get it, the gliding and flying becomes engaging.
To fight the game will prompt you to draw certain characters on the screen. Then the monkey will execute a kill. To progress through the levels you tip the iPhone side to side. The strength of the game is its’ a look and feel. The control scheme, though it isn’t original works great. After playing several of this games on the DS, playing it on the iPod was much more fluid. The DS screens are much slower and feels like there is friction there that you don’t get on the iPod. Read more

While looking at Apps for grocery lists I also checked out a few that had to do with sushi. Three of the best were Sushipedia, and Sushi Guru to help you to identify the delectable morsels with well lit photography that looks great on the small screen. Sushi Chain Lite is a fast paced mini game.  Read more

Cooking software has expanded far beyond the old hyper card stacks of text recipes. If you are bored, frazzled or feeling unimaginative there’s an App for that. With the easy tool – for – everything interface that Apps have, you can now find out what’s for dinner with cooking assistants,  recipe spinners,  list keepers, and gadgets that will even tell you what to do with what’s in your refrigerator. There are Apps which offer coupons. Apps themselves are a revolution in software that turns all the information available into funtional power tools.  If a robot memorized every App in the App store the thing would be dangerous.  But darn, it could cook like a 4 star chef. Read more