Chimo NgeBlog : Android Game Review : Captain America

We all have biases and when I saw Captain America appear in the Android Market around the time the movie was released I think I created what the game would be in my mind. I figured that it would be a game about a super hero with puzzle elements to solve based around super human abilities. Oh, and I figured tossing my shield around to activate a switch and knock an enemy down here and there would be part of the mix. I didn't think it would be anything special, but I thought such a game had promise. THIS isn't that game so please forget what you just read.

Captain America is a game that upon playing it I was immediately reminded of Stellar Escape. It's a pretty straight forward running and jumping game with baddies thrown in for good measure. In true super hero fashion you start off with a mission to rescue three cohorts. However, you, being Captain America and all, don't need any help so you're going to do it all by your lonesome. Off you go. The game has a fantastic in game tutorial that explains moves only as you need them. I really love that kind of system as I can't stand games that require me to read an hour's worth of instructions before jumping in. I want to learn as I play. First up, swipe right to run right.

So now I'm running right. My first obstacle appears and the game pauses to show me that a diagonal southwest to northeast swipe will allow the Captain to jump. Then it's sliding. Then it's throwing my shield and beating the crap (not killing!) out of the bad guys. So how does this stack up to Stellar Escape? Well, there's a lot more to it in terms of moves, but it's also trying to be something a little (just a little) different.

Graphically the game has a nice 3D style engine, despite the action being 2D, and the sound effects are of professional quality. I like the fact that they didn't try to incorporate an on screen DPad or on screen buttons to move Mr. America and really appreciate the gesture system although throwing your shield does require use of an on screen button. The game plays smooth. Each step of the mission is reasonable short and takes a couple minutes to play through making this is a decent game to bite away at a chunk at a time.

Pricewise the game is an enigma to me. It was initially launched at 80% off during its initial weekend and priced at $0.99. Here we are a month later and it's still $0.99. At that price this is worth every penny and it's a great game for a buck unless you abhor running and jumping games. Will it ever actually go up to $5? Do the people at Marvel Entertainment have some sort of 'super hero' calendar they use? At $5 the purchase becomes questionable given other games that are available at lower prices (or even free).

I like Captain America. It does a good job of what it tries to do. It plays well, it's enjoyable, and I have no reservations in recommending it at a buck. It even plays well on my tablet. 4/5 stars.

READ MORE - Chimo NgeBlog : Android Game Review : Captain America

Chimo NgeBlog : movie review : One Day

he title of "One Day" is, alas, meant to be taken literally. Based on the eponymous 2009 bestseller by David Nicholls, the film stars Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess as star-crossed would-be lovers whose lives are presented to us in 20 annual, same-day installments, beginning on July 15, 1988.
Incidentally, why didn't the marketers open the film on July 15? Just asking.
The problem with this year-by-year structure is that the slow crawl to the end can seem agonizing if the film isn't engaging. And "One Day," despite strenuous attempts by all involved to make us laugh, cry, and laugh-cry, is more likely to induce winces. We've seen it all before – and better.

IN PICTURES: 2011 Summer sequels

Emma (Hathaway) and Dexter (Sturgess) are first presented to us as tipsy, newly minted college graduates. Emma, from a working-class English background, has a secret crush on well-born Dex. With her yen not quite consummated, we are then subjected to the ongoing saga of how these two, year by year, dart in and out of each other's lives. When will Dex pull off the blinders and realize Emma is his soul mate? (One hint: If he did it early on, there wouldn't be a movie.)
This is one of those films where the lead actress's attractiveness is intentionally played down in the early scenes so that we can register her subsequent magical transformation into a looker. For Hathaway, circa 1988, this means geeky glasses and frumpy clothes. Also a northern British accent that is somewhat variable depending on the scene. Its authenticity is generally in inverse proportion to her decibel level.
Emma dreams of becoming a writer – we know she's an intellectual because she reads Milan Kundera – but is stuck waitressing in a dead-end Tex-Mex restaurant. Dex, meanwhile, has a burgeoning career as a TV presenter on moronic variety shows. This turns out to be something of a dead end, too. (Are we supposed to think he's a failure because he didn't make it big with even more moronic TV shows?)
As each year ticked off on the screen, I began to dread the next installment because I could see where this all was headed long before either Emma or Dex did. (And no, I haven't read the book.) I was overprepared for the inevitable moment when Emma utters the immortal words, "I love you, Dex. I really do. I just don't like you anymore."
But of course, she's fibbing, even if she doesn't realize it at the time. Emma may live in Paris and have a hottie French boyfriend. She may be a successful children's book author. None of this really matters when it comes to the love of her life.
But why is Dex such an immovable fixture in her fantasy life? Emma's decades-long adoration has to be accepted as a given. If not, the whole thing falls apart, which it sort of does anyway.
Sturgess, despite going through a lengthy character arc, doesn't change much as an actor from year to year. Hathaway is somewhat more convincing, if only because her performance, along with her accent, settles down as the years tick off. The aging jobs on the two leads are not very convincing – they look about seven years older by the end. This is just as well, since most movie characters are aged so inauthentically they seem to jump from cherub to Methuselah in a single bound.
Director Lone Scherfig, working from Nicholls's screenplay, takes a big step back here from "An Education," her last film. For all its faults, that movie had a rigor and a sense of human loss almost entirely missing from this rom-com weepie. My guess is that she felt almost as hemmed in by the year-after-year ploddishness as we do. Grade: C- (Rated PG-13 for sexual content, partial nudity, language, some violence, and substance abuse.)

READ MORE - Chimo NgeBlog : movie review : One Day

Chimo NgeBlog : Movie Review: Fright Night Struggles to Nail the Horror-Comedy Balance

An R-rated horror-comedy with sharp fangs and a goofball soul, Fright Night cashes in on the coffin craze by spit-taking blood all over the Twilight franchise. The setting is, appropriately enough, a ghost-town subdivision outside housing-boom-busted Las Vegas, where a suspicious number of homes stand empty. Were the neighbors all foreclosed upon? Turns out, the bad guy isn’t the vampire squid Goldman Sachs. It’s the actual vampire next door.
Anton Yelchin, suddenly all grown up and leading-man handsome, plays Charley, the geek turned stud who, as soon as puberty hit, ditched his geeky bestie Ed
(Christopher Mintz-Plasse, stock nerd nonpareil) for the cool-kid table and his girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots). As it turns out, the dweeb detective has determined that a vampire is disappearing the neighbors — and he’s not the modish dreamy kind of bloodsucker. “Vampires aren’t brooding or lovesick or noble,” Ed rants, in one of many digs at Team Edward. “He’s the fucking shark from Jaws.”
The vampire is Jerry, a muscled-up stud who moves in next door looking like Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are All Right, complete with cuff bracelet, scruff, henley tee, and dangling necklace. It’s actually Colin Farrell, whose every creepy leer at Charley’s mother (Toni Collette) screams MILF bloodlust. He's always either radiating smoldering menace or gawking like a crazy person, and often both. Jerry is a vampire who seems to be bored of cover-ups and politesse; now he’s just bloodthirsty and psycho. Sure, Farrell’s performance may not make much sense, but neither do centuries-old vampires living in Nevadan subdivisions. So he goes for it. At times, Farrell is as hilariously over-the-top as Nicolas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss. Though he may not turn into a bat, he raises and flaps his big bushy black eyebrows around so much it seems as if they might fly off his face.
Lars and the Real Girl’s Craig Gillespie brings to the project a casual touch with actors, so the gore is occasionally balanced by grace notes of actual human acting. The ever-more-impressive Yelchin makes the most of these opportunities, shrugging off lines with casual carelessness. He has a mature feel for playing against the grain, even as the action is raging, and he steps on his own punch lines just enough to temper their gimmickry. He’s immensely likable here; Poots, with much less to do, is a game accomplice.
The film is written by Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum Marti Nixon as a möbius script of endlessly looping meta-references to vampire lore and franchises. Even Doctor Who fans will be gratified to see David Tennant playing Peter Vincent, an absurd Criss Angel–style neo-Goth occult star with a collection of vintage vampire-slaying tools and the looks of Russell Brand’s dissipated cousin. The film isn’t a radical reconfiguration of vampire mythology; it’s a goofy, ridiculous monster-mash-up of your favorite vampire tunes. (Though, as in most cases these days, the 3-D is a completely dispensable rip-off.)
The film falters toward the end, as Gillespie begins to take the stakes a little too seriously and the jokes get lost in all the blood-sucking, stake-stabbing, and vampire-incinerating.
The best horror comedies (Shaun of the Dead, Dead Alive) tilt the balance toward comedy and become increasingly absurd, so that the lunacy of the comedy increases in tandem with the escalating violence, and the gasps and big laughs work in synch. In the end, Fright Night gets lost in special effects as it aims for a big final fight scene that’s merely ho-hum.
A film with so many absurd moments deserved a more outrageous finale than a basement battle royale. (I was hoping they’d be unleashed on the streets of Vegas, perhaps near the Luxor.) But the horror-comedy (or "thrill-omedy," in 1990 parlance) is as hard a genre to nail as vampires are to stake. A dumb-fun horror movie earns mocking laughter, and straight horror elicits nervous laughter, but the best horror-comedies can make you laugh and gasp and scream, all at the same time. With the help of a witty script and some fresh performances, Fright Night comes close: It’ll make you flinch and giggle, for sure, but it won’t leave you howling, either with laughter or surprise.

READ MORE - Chimo NgeBlog : Movie Review: Fright Night Struggles to Nail the Horror-Comedy Balance

Chimo NgeBlog : Movie Preview: ‘Machine Gun Preacher’

This is the best trailer for a fall film that I’ve seen so far. Moving, emotional, action-packed and funny.
A real tour de Gerry for Gerard Butler. The early buzz on “Machine Gun Preacher” is that it has Oscar potential, despite the fact that the film plainly has action picture appeal in addition to its tale of misery and redemption.
Michelle Monaghan, Madeleine Carroll, Michael Shannon and Soulemane Sy Savane from “Goodbye, Solo.” A very good cast.
Winter Garden native Sam Childers really lucked out with who decided to film his story and who decided to play him.
Look for “Machine Gun Preacher” in theaters in October.

READ MORE - Chimo NgeBlog : Movie Preview: ‘Machine Gun Preacher’

Chimo NgeBlog : Android Game Review: Cut the Rope

You might think physics is boring, but wait just a minute. Did you enjoy games like Worms and Angry Birds when you first played them? Well then, you actually love physics. A popular iOS game which found its way to Android, Cut the Rope, is yet another physics based game, with hilariously cute graphics. To play this one you’re going to have to brains and quick reactions.

Cut the Rope is an adorably illustrated puzzle game. The very first screen when you start playing the game is a cartoon style scene inside a house, of an open front door with a box containing an abandoned creature, with instructions to feed with candy. That creature turns out to be a little green guy called “Om Nom” (full marks for plugging into Internet memes!).

Om Nom arriving on your doorstep

Your job is to feed Om Nom with candy. Because he’s such a hungry guy, you can’t just hand him the stuff, it has to be passed to him via rope. After all – safety is no accident!

Similarly to Angry Birds, Cut the Rope has sets of levels, each with a different theme. In the case of the Cut the Rope, each theme is based around a different box to keep Om Nom in, along with certain little gadgets to differentiate the game play.

As you start the first few levels, hints and tips appear, and this carries through to the higher levels whenever there are new game elements to play with. The whole experience is there to help you along and enjoy things. This ethos even goes to the the point of letting you skip entire levels.

Your first level, showing you how to play

The early levels are simply a case of cutting the rope at the right moment, so that the candy will either swing to the next rope, or land straight in Om Nom’s waiting mouth. Anyone who has studied physics and has an intuition for momentum, and oscillatory motion could well have an advantage here. In other words, if you like to give your phone or tablet to the kids, to keep them quiet for a while, this is a sly way to get them thinking like the next Isaac Newton!

As you progress, you find various new elements, like bubbles which will float the candy, until your pop them. There are sliding rope tethers, which you can use to carry the candy around, and if the candy is hooked onto two ropes at once, you can slide one end back, until the rope turns red. That means the rope under tension and when you cut the rope (TM!), all that energy is released and you can fire the candy like a shot! Other devices include air puffers which allow you to push to your candy, whether it be on a rope or a bubble. In the later levels you even take to space where you can invert artificial gravity! In addition to these devices, there are hazards too, like electrical arcs, and spiders that crawl down the rope wanting the candy for themselves!

Hazards while feeding Om Nom

An added challenge to the game is to collect stars, by having the candy touch them. This adds structure to each level. In many cases, it would be much easier just to get the candy to Om Nom directly. Instead though, you have to come up with plans and tricks to get the candy all around the screen to pick up the stars. Of course, simply feeding Om Nom is enough to progress to the next level, but it’s only by collecting enough stars throughout the course of the game that you can unlock the last two sets of levels.

Magic hats give you Portal-like gameplay

At its heart, Cut the Rope is a puzzle game. Zeptolab deserve great credit for keeping the game fresh by differentiating the types of puzzle you encounter from level to level. Some levels are complicated puzzles where you can take your time and go step by step. While other levels pose a challenge to your reaction speed, either by having to avoid hazards, or by needing to keep the candy’s momentum going, just like sugary Tarzan! Many of the higher levels require both of these traits, and so you’ll need to make multiple attempts just to work out your game plan. It’s this switching of styles that keeps the game fresh, and keep you wanting to come back for more.

Each level set (or ‘box’) has seventy five levels, and there are seven sets in total. That is enough to keep you busy for weeks. Even then, the ‘box’ selection screen promises that more levels are ‘coming soon’. That’s extremely good value when you consider that Cut the Rope only costs $1.00 / £0.62.

I heartily recommend you try out Cute the Rope! (Yes, the pun was completely intentional).

Click or scan to buy Cut the Rope from the Android Market Place

Tags: Android Game Review: Cut the Rope

READ MORE - Chimo NgeBlog : Android Game Review: Cut the Rope

Chimo NgeBlog : Android Game Review: apzOrb

apzOrb is a new game for Android. Despite having significant differences I can’t help but think of the classic Snake game genre. You’re in control of a creature that is composed of groups of swirling cubes. Its only aim in life is to consume more and more blocks and survive as long as possible. Sounds fun, but read on to see whether it has long term appeal!

Delving into our gaming heritage, it is perhaps unfair to compare apzOrb to snakes as they are fundamentally different. The Snakes genre had you navigating (in up/down or left/right directions) a continually moving line (the snake) around a game grid, picking up tokens for points. Each time you picked up a token the snake would get longer. If the snake collided with its tail, it would be game over.

apzOrb's main menu

Similarly with apzOrb, you are guiding a continually moving linear sprite around the game, picking up tokens (cubes) for points. The difference is that the the ‘snake’ doesn’t get longer when it apzOrbs anything. The penalty system in this game (and thus what you have to avoid) is based on color. There’s a wide spectrum of colours that fill the game arena, and you have to collect colors that match your snake’s color. Fortunately, it seems to be ‘okay’ within the rules to eat similar colors, the snake will take on the colour of whatever it last ate. For example if your snake is red, you’re allowed to eat red, orange, pink, and purple blocks. Eat a blue, cyan, green, or yellow block though, and you will lose a life and big letters will spell out across the screen that you got the “WRONG COLOR!”.

apzOrb gameplay

apzOrb is more forgiving than the original Snakes game too. You have a number of lives, and you can switch to any color as long as you go in a rainbow-like progression. The more ‘correct’ colours you pick up the more you build up a bar on the right of the screen which appears to be a bonus accumulator for scoring higher on further correct colors.

The other difference with apzOrb is that there is complete freedom of movement. Dragging anywhere in the screen will make the snake move in that direction. However, there’s an interesting physics model at work here. It very much looks and feels like the snake is swimming in a fluid. Therefore, best speed is achieved by moving your finger back and forth to make the snake move in a kind of rippling motion. As the snake turns, the blocks that make up its body all follow in a nice curved trajectory.

Here’s an example of the game in action,

The artwork in apzOrb is interesting too. While you are clearly playing in a two dimensional plane, there is an animated background with distant, out of focus, snakes swimming around eating up blocks, just like you are. It really does give you a feel of being a tiny creature swimming in a pool, rather like the early levels of Will Writght’s Spore. The downside of this is that you’re sometimes not sure if a block is in your plane or not.

There are two game modes, a simple survival mode game, where you keep going until you make too many mistakes, and the time trial mode. In the time mode you have 90 seconds to do as well as you can. Not only are you scored on the blocks you collect, but also on the efficiency of your collecting, a percentage of collecting the correct color versus the wrong color.

Overall, I liked apzOrb. It’s engaging but it’s not frantic, which means it’s an ideal chill out game. You can pick up an ad-supported version for free, or get rid of the ads by buying the full version for $2.29 / £1.39.

Click or scan to install apzOrb Free

Click or scan to install apzOrb HD

Tags: Android Game Review: apzOrb

READ MORE - Chimo NgeBlog : Android Game Review: apzOrb

Chimo NgeBlog : Upgrade your Nokia 5800 to Nokia 500

The new Nokia 500 is only the third phone to run the new Symbian Anna operatig system, but it is also the first Symbian device to pack a 1GHz processor. We think it is the ideal phone to consider if you want to replace a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. Read on to find out why.

Nokia 500: 10 things you need to know

It doesn't seem that long ago that the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was first touching down. In fact, it was three years ago and even though it's still in active duty for many of us, it's fair to say the former music flagship phone is looking a little long in the tooth.

And if you are in the market for a replacement, we reckon the Nokia 500 is well worth a second look, as it provides the same combination of powerful features, pocketability and value for money that made the Nokia 5800 such a favourite.

First, the display, The resolution and screen size may be the same, but the old resistive touchscreen of the 5800 has been replaced by a capacitive touchscreen. The difference between the two is significant, and means you can finally leave your plectrum stylus at home and use your very own digits for touchscreen satisfaction.

And much that we loved the style of the Nokia 5800, there's no denying that it was a little on the chunky side at 15.5mm thick and weighing in at 109g. The new Nokia 500 is much slimmer and lighter, coming in at 93g and 14.1mm thick. The design of the phone has also been brought bang up to date with a great combination of curves and angles.

Web surfing on the 5800 is – and we are being charitable here – a bit of a chore. Symbian Anna brings with it a completely rewritten web browser that is easy to navigate by touchscreen alone and makes web browsing on a Nokia smartphone faster than ever before.

The 3-megapixel camera on the 5800 was no slouch but the Nokia 500 bumps it up to a pin-sharp 5 megapixels with the same Carl Zeiss optics.

The 5800 XpressMusic was all about multimedia and although the Nokia 500 lacks the dedicated music controls of the 5800 (but makes up for them with its smaller size) the Symbian Anna OS can play all the popular audio formats and provides the same whopping 35 hours of music playing time along with 5-7 hours of talk time and over 450 hours of standby time from the battery.

Symbian Anna itself is a huge step up for Nokia's touchscreen phones, and a massive leap forwards from the Nokia 5800's Symbian S60 5th Edition. The redesigned controls and great-looking new icons feel natural under your fingertips, and the combination of the Symbian Anna interface and the capacitive screen will make a world of difference.

The speedy 1GHz processor means that the Nokia 500 runs faster than any other Symbian phone, allowing Symbian Anna to really fly. Add to that package the eye candy of swappable case covers (three are included, with more on sale soon) and the Nokia 500 ticks all the right boxes as a worthy replacement to the classic Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

Tags: Upgrade your Nokia 5800 to Nokia 500

READ MORE - Chimo NgeBlog : Upgrade your Nokia 5800 to Nokia 500