iPod Touch

The reality is that match 3 games - the genre made famous by the game Bejeweled - are currently a dime a dozen in the App Store.  So what does a developer need to do to make their take on the match 3 game stand out from the crowd?  I'd say that taking lessons from Treasures Of Montezuma would be a great start.  I have several of the hotly anticipated iDevice titles that have come out over the past couple of months sitting on my device, yet I find myself continually drawn to playing TOM instead.  To me that speaks to both the addictive nature of the genre and the creativity the designers employed to make TOM a match 3 experience unlike most others on the iDevice.

Eat Will Grow was one of those "hey, it's temporarily free so let's grab it" type downloads. As it turns out, I'm glad I did. The premise is simply to last as long as you can before colliding with what I would describe as a mine. Along the way you'll collect rings for points, but the rings will cause you to grow over time (it's sort of like the old snake game except you grow bigger around rather than longer). You can also collect a power up that will temporarily either speed up or slow down the flow of the game.

Toki Tori Enthusiasts Win Awesome Prizes For Promoting the Game

In preparation of the May 22nd Toki Tori iPhone launch, in conjunction with the celebration of the one year anniversary of the WiiWare™ game, Two Tribes and Chillingo are inviting gamers to show off their creative skills in the newly launched Toki Tori Promotion Contest. The contest challenges entrants to think of cool ways to promote the game.

The developer of Steppin has just reduced the price to — free! This game for iPhone and iPod Touch entails using your fingers as if they're your feet to navigate five levels of courses, from skipping across lilies in a pond, to traversing the face of a cliff. You use the multitouch capability of the screen to get across all five levels in the fastest time. A scoreboard system tracks your best time as well as reporting the best player of the day, week, and ever.

Earlier this week Amazon launched an iPhone-friendly version of its website. When you go to Amazon.com in Safari on your iPhone or iPod Touch, it automatically gives you the iPhone version (and gives you the option of seeing the PC version, if you want). This is the whole Amazon site, not just the Kindle ebook area. If you do a search, you can, just like the desktop site, search any specific area of the site, or choose just to search the Kindle area.

My hope was to get this out before Mother's Day was over - at least by me - but I missed it by "that much".  Anyway, I thought I'd take a couple minutes to talk about a relatively new iPhone application called Flower Garden.  I hesitate to call this a game, because the only thing in it that's reminiscent of gaming is the need to unlock the various types of flowers you can grow.  I suppose a better classification for this would be an "entertainment" package.  In the end, though, it's really mostly one of those Zen like relaxation packages.&nb

MyWisdom is a real gem. It's a well organized collection of bits of wisdom — thousands of quotations from over 500 different individuals — currently on sale for .99. You can view a list of authors — from Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, and Abraham Lincoln, to Marie Osmond, Ben Harper, Nicholas Cage, and Paul McCartney. The range is remarkable. You can also view by category, from Altruism & Cynicism to Work & Recreation.