Games

Peggle, the ridiculously entertaining Pachinko-inspired game that debuted on the Web and quickly spread to nearly every platform known to man, has finally arrived in the App Store. Farewell (again), personal productivity!

The game requires almost no skill: You just point your pinball at the pegs and shoot. The goal is to clear all the orange pegs using the allotted number of balls. The fun lies in watching the ball carom down the table, knocking out pegs as it eventually ricochets through to the bottom.

Of course, careful aim can help improve your chances, as can various power-ups, bonuses, and &… Read more

When I was a wee lad my family used to drive an hour north of the San Francisco Bay Area to visit my grandparents in Santa Rosa, Calif. My sister and I were at the age where we needed something to keep us busy at all times, so my grandparents often had to come up with things for us to do once the toys we brought along no longer held our interest. In one room of my grandparent's place, my grandfather had set up a recliner chair right next to a table with an emergency scanner on it. He … Read more

Earlier this week it was Myst. Now another PC classic (hell, Apple II classic) has made its way to the iPhone. Lemonade Tycoon is Electronic Arts' adaptation of the seminal Lemonade Stand, a business and economics lesson shrouded in an addictive turn-based strategy game.

Indeed, what looks like (and is) a cute little kids game about running a lemonade stand is actually a clever course in sales, marketing, and management. The goal: Build your neighborhood juice biz into a Starbucks-like lemonade empire. ("Lemonade-bucks"? Nah. Hopefully Marketing can come up with something snappier.)

To turn your lemons into yellow … Read more

Any longtime fan of PC gaming is likely familiar with the saga of Duke Nukem Forever. Announced by developer 3D Realms in April of 1997, Duke Nukem Forever was supposed to be the sequel to 1996's hit first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D. After 12 years in development, and 3D Realms' continued insistence that it was still working on the game, gaming news site Shacknews reported Wednesday night that 3D Realms has shut its doors.

An almost annual winner of Wired's Vaporware Awards, Duke Nukem Forever had at least two wholesale 3D engine changes and two different publishers throughout … Read more

Everything old is new again. Myst for iPhone and iPod Touch puts one of the best-selling computer games of all time into the palm of your hand. It's in the App Store now for $5.99.

If you're too young to remember Myst (in which case I hate you), it's a first-person graphical adventure that's not unlike dropping into the middle of "Lost." You find yourself on a deserted island (or is it?) filled with mysterious objects, machines, puzzles--maybe even a hatch or two.

The iPhone version looks just like its PC predecessor, from … Read more

The big news in iPhone software this week is Silicon Valley start-up Booyah announced yesterday they had raised $4.5 million in Series A funding from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, & Byers (KPCB) iFund for a new mystery iPhone product. The "iFund" is a $100 million venture capital fund that was set up specifically to fund exceptional iPhone software development.

So, how did this obscure start-up secure this kind of iFunding? Booyah was started by Keith Lee, Brian Morrisroe, and Sam Christiansen who had worked previously at Blizzard Entertainment, Activision, and Insomniac Games, respectively. This group of industry heavyweights … Read more

Since launching its Dictionary.com app for iPhone and iPod Touch in early April, the folks over at Dictionary.com have been plotting other iPhone applications that use the tools they've got: grammatical, orthographic, synonymic authority. And while they're at it, maybe duplicate the numerical success of their reference app, which has floated among the iTunes Top 10 since its launch, and which hit more than a million downloads within the first three weeks.

The conduit of such lofty ambitions is Miss Spell's Class, a 99-cent app that despite its name, letter-grade scoring, and nostalgic background of college-ruled paper, Dictionary.com insists is aimed at their core demographic of high school and university students, and business professionals.

The app is straightforward. You quickly decide which of the 20 words in the round are spelled correctly or incorrectly. Points are knocked off for inaccuracy, and added to your total time. If it takes you 40 seconds to go through the list, but you get two wrong, your score spikes up to 60 seconds, a B. So save the pokiness for reviewing your score and for kicking yourself for casual errors.

The game is cute all right, and a test to the ego in the way that SATs and other standardized tests are--taunting in their simplicity, and debasing when you miss a word you ought to know. At least you're not alone--the misspellings that are your object to spot are siphoned straight from the top 5,000 botched words entered into Dictionary.com at a rate of 2 million typos and flubs per month.

Still, there are a few light raps of the ruler we'd make. In a test game, 'consiencious' was paired with 'consensus', rather than with 'conscientious'. Apart from that, we're not quite convinced the game will make us more intelligent, until Dictionary.com slips in definitions, and perhaps the pronunciation guide from the free Dictionary.com iPhone app. Miss Spell's Class is also a bit one-dimensional. Although this game title is just the beginning, we'd like to see it instilled with different skill levels and playing modes, where you might actively spell a word, not just passively review it, or quickly choose the right configuration from a handful of choices. There should be different skins to pull in the grade-school youngsters, old fogeys, and tweens who are too cool for school, and competitions over Wi-Fi.… Read more

Let's Golf is a new game for the iPhone and iPod Touch that lets users play 63 holes in four distinct locations that have been remodeled in 3D. Those locations are referred to as Fiji Beach, the American Mountains, the English Countryside, and Scottish Lochs. You can choose to play as one of four customizable characters, and you can compete with friends via a Wi-Fi multiplayer mode. Let's Golf boasts scalable game modes ranging from Advanced, which allows you to add spin to the ball, to Causal, which is easier and lets just about anyone experience a Tiger … Read more

This week, Apple surpassed an amazing milestone at the iTunes app store: one billion downloads. Apple had been running a contest called the Billion App Countdown promotion with prizes including a chance to win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, a MacBook Pro, an iPod Touch, and more. Though the contest ended once they reached their mark (winners will be announced soon), it's still an amazing feat and clearly implies the apps are going to keep on coming. That's great news for iPhone app lovers like us!

It's no secret that the most popular apps at the … Read more