DJ Baby

DJ Baby is a simple iPhone/iPod Touch app that lets even small children rock the turntables. It’s dead simple to use: Each of the four “records” has a vocal sample, and the button with the musical note starts and stops the  backbeat.  Clicking on the needle varies the vocal sample a little.  You can try out the app online (Flash required), although it’s more engaging with the touchscreen interface.  Plus, if you shake the device, there’s a bonus sound effect!

The app is definitely easy to use: Basically, if you trust your kid to hold the device, then they’ll be able to figure out the interface.  And the target audience–say, 6 and under?–will almost certainly find it diverting, although children in the older part of that range might not be willing to play long at a stretch without asking to play something else.

The simplicity has some consequences: there’s no way to save a beat, nor is there a way to create your own sample, whether by recording your voice or using a track from iTunes.  You can see why: It would defeat the whole purpose of the app if you were constantly being called over to fiddle with settings.

DJ Baby is $0.99 on iTunes.

Wired: Simple, fun turntable app for young children.

Tired: No customization options in this release.

Screenshots © Armor Games; used with permission.

The beauty of many, if not most, video games lies in their ability to distance players from the real world by taking them into a fantastical alternative reality. So imagine, if you will, that you live in a world covered with elaborate castles made from wood, iron, and stone, but that are held together without mortar or indeed any sort of connective material between pieces. Further, imagine that it was your task to kill all the inhabitants of these castles armed only with a trebuchet and various projectiles.

It is to this world that the game Crush the Castle for the iPhone/iPod Touch takes you. The mechanics of the game are simple: You simply tap the screen once to start the trebuchet in motion, and tap again to release the projectile(s). Should you want to change ammunition, two more taps will take care of that. Your task is to crush the castles, as the name states, but most importantly to kill any and all the people in each castle.

These people — who are meant to look like kings, ladies of various kinds, and guards — don’t fight back, and won’t even move as giant boulders or bombs streak through the air, raining doom upon them. If that makes the game sound easy, it isn’t. Sure, you’ll earn a gold medal on some castles on your first try (the kind of medal you earn depends on the number of shots you need to kill all the people, and is based on each castle’s difficulty). But some castles will have you tapping Reset to start over again at zero shots, and desperately trying different trebuchet release points until you find something that works. One castle took me well over twenty tries to crush, and then I only just managed to earn a bronze medal.

Screenshot © Armor Games; used with permission.

I leaped at the chance to play the iPhone game, because I’d played the original Flash game and its sequel online, and thoroughly enjoyed both. The iPhone game has many very different castles from the online versions, and at least one new projectile type as well (I have yet to finish the iPhone game, so can’t be certain it stops at one). So even if you’ve played the originals, you’ll find lots new with the iPhone version, but the fundamentals are still the same.

It’s a great game for kids, too. Yes, you’re trying to kill people, and yes, when they die there is a little splatter of blood. But the people never move on their own, so it’s unrealistic enough that it’s not likely to traumatize or desensitize anyone. And the mechanics are so dead simple that any kid who understands how to tap the iPhone screen can play.

Crush the Castle is $1.99 from the iTunes App Store, and will provide hours of entertainment. If you’re unconvinced and want to try it out before spending money on it, there is a limited free edition of the game available as well.

Wired: Way more fun than it has any right to be, really, and well worth dropping $1.99 on.

Tired: Some of the castles were a bit more frustrating than necessary, I thought. But if it weren’t challenging, it wouldn’t be much fun, would it?

(Full disclosure: I received a free copy of the $1.99 version of the game.)

Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired.com.

There has been much speculation about what Apple will be announcing today. Will it be a glorified book reader? An iPod Touch/iPhone on steroids? We will find out very quickly here, and then we can all envision how we could use the device. Will it help you at work? Will it be the perfect commuting partner? Will you use it as the mother of all television remotes? Consider this, though. How will it affect our children? How will they use the tablet?

If your children are anything like mine, they will want to play with it the moment it comes out of the box. They will be amazed at how large their favorite iPod Touch apps look on the larger screen. And the screen will be large enough that they can both play with it at once.

In our house, though, the Apple tablet will be used a great deal for education. I have a plethora of .pdf files to use for homeschooling that are just inconvenient to use on a desktop computer, or even on a laptop. On a tablet, the files could be sitting next to us at the table, just like a text book. The kids could mark up the pages as if they were writing in a workbook. We could watch videos from the internet or do interactive educational websites (I’m looking at you, BBC) without leaving our school table. When we go on a trip, we could bring our entire homeschool library with us. Of course, we’d have to have two tablets, since we have two children.

More than that, though, the tablet will completely integrate education and technology, allowing for easy access to e-textbooks and online teaching. In the regular education world, imagine if each desk had one of these tablets. No longer would students have to crane their necks or squint from the back row to read what is being written up on the board. It will automatically show up on their desk’s tablet. You wouldn’t need to take any notes, since it would all be emailed to you at the end of the class, or automatically beamed to your own personal electronic device.

Children will be designing their own apps from an early age. Since the tablet will be such a part of their lives, they won’t be intimidated by the technology. Since the larger tablet size will allow for more than one person to sit around it (but perhaps only two people), the children will probably design two player games. Or whole rooms of tablets can be instantly networked to allow for multiplayer games, or even educational activities like a group tour of the pyramids or Machu Picchu.

The possibilities are really endless, limited only by our imaginations. We shall see how the tablet really affects us, but children will instantly invite this technology into their lives. Watch how they use it, and you’ll learn new areas to develop. Inevitably, children invent new ways to use technology, so pay attention. You might learn something.

As a parent of a three-year-old, distractions can be a powerful tool. Whether you’re at a restaurant waiting for food to arrive, visiting friends without your child’s favorite toy, or stuck in traffic in a car, being able to distract your child with something entertaining can be quite a relief. And while not suitable every time they may need a diversion, Talking Carl for the iPhone represents the best 99¢ I’ve spent on an app in a long time.

The genius of this app is twofold. First, it’s incredibly cute. As you can see from the above images, Carl is a red monsterish thing with a huge mouth. But he’s a cute monsterish thing like you find on Sesame Street. If you tickle him, he laughs. If you poke him in the eye, he yells at you. If you ignore him, he grumbles. Second, he repeats anything you say. Using the iPhone’s mic (or an external mic for the iPod Touch), Carl listens to what you say, then repeats it back in a higher-pitched modulated voice. His mouth animates to the amplitude of your voice so it appears that he’s talking. The animations are smooth and there are no confusing buttons or options; just you and Carl.

And that’s it. Ridiculously simple and fundamentally entertaining. Not only has my son been enthralled for hours with this thing, watching him interact with his “red friend” gets us laughing too. If only there was a dedicated toy for this thing because I’m increasingly finding I’m not getting my iPhone back…

Talking Carl (iTunes Link), $0.99

Where The Flock screenshot courtesy of byteIDEA

Question: if you had the ability to track your child’s every movement during the day, would you do so? Or is this an example of helicopter parenting taken to extremes? How about tucking a portable GPS unit in her backpack?

Partaking in my Saturday morning ritual of coffee accompanied by a laptop to scan through the daily newspapers, I came across a Toronto Star article by reporter Robert Cribb, who has been testing the Entourage PS, a portable device offered by a Canadian company called Blackline GPS. (Wired reviewed an earlier version of this technology by the same company in 2008.)

The twist on this one is that Robert used the GPS to track his 5-year-old daughter during her walk to school, slipping the GPS into her backpack, then monitoring it remotely (on his computer screen or Blackberry). The father in me definitely sees the appeal of this capability — it’s very similar to the initial wave of comfort I felt with the concept of being able to log on and watch the goings on at the daycare on webcam. And like the webcam, the initial “that’s an awesome idea!” phase wore off a bit the more I thought about it, replaced with the feeling that maybe these things are going just a little too far.

In theory, tracking by GPS is a great parental advantage, but what happens if your kid ducks round a corner to look at something? Maybe it violates the instructions of coming straight home, but kids will be kids. You wouldn’t know any better under normal circumstances. However, as a red blip on a screen that suddenly deviates from course, do you freeze and stare at it, leap out of a meeting to drive screaming across town to the rescue, or call 9-1-1 in case it’s a potential abduction?

What if their backpack is swiped or picked up accidentally at school? These things happen and the mix-up could end with police chasing some innocent parent driving their kid home with the wrong backpack.

It’s costly, too: You’d have to fork out CN$350 for the GPS unit itself, plus $15 a month for a service subscription.

And then there’s the issue of technology falling into the wrong hands. It’s not like this isn’t a secure service, but we’ve seen far too many examples of military communications being intercepted, and nothing is hack-proof.

A planned neighborhood in my city was built with a central playground equipped with video cameras and all the houses were prewired to be able to watch the park on their TVs. The idea sounded great at first — your kids run off to happily and securely play at the park and you can watch them while you cook dinner. But like things have a way of doing, the technology was subverted and squabbles broke out over people watching “inappropriately” and the like.

Maybe you gain a bit of personal safety, but potentially lose some with a smattering of confusion and civil discord thrown in with each of these advances. At any rate, if the concept appeals to you, there are also alternatives that offer similar functionality without the associated costs.

An iPhone, for instance, provides the GPS, and apps like Where the Flock (WTF) can give you info like the updated location and speed of not just one person, but anyone you know who packs an iPhone and cares to share with you. Of course an iPhone and data plan is going to cost a little more than $15 month, but it’s also not a one-trick pony.

Personally, I’m going to continue to do it the old-school way — I’m fortunate enough to be able to walk my kids to school and back most days (at least while they’re young enough to still let me), but once they’re teenagers, they may each just get a WTF-equipped iPhone for their birthday.

Ike-Dog Image: Dave Banks

There’s a great little app that’s just made its way to the iTunes store. It’s called LEGO Photo (links to iTunes), and it allows you to take any photo from your camera lens or your existing library and turn the pixels into LEGO bricks. It’s simple to use – just take or pick out a photo, click the button … and you’re done. If you’re not happy with the outcome, simply touch the screen and the app chooses a new palette of colors. Once you’re satisfied, click save and your LEGOized photo is saved to your photo library. And the best part of all – LEGO Photo is free.

Update: A fun suggestion from GeekDad Matt Blum: Take a screenshot on your phone (press Home button & Sleep/Wake button simultaneously – it will be saved in your photo album) and turn it into LEGO bricks.

Image by Ernesto Lago; used under Creative Commons Attribution license.

Repeat after me: “I hereby resolve that in the new year I…”

1. Will faithfully read every new xkcd, Penny Arcade and of course Dork Tower strip as it appears. If the joke in a strip is too esoteric for me, I will of course promptly Google it and subsequently pretend that I understood it immediately.

2. Will play with and encourage my kids to play with LEGO, since it is after all the best toy in the world. If I don’t have kids, I will simply have to play with LEGO myself that much more.

3. Will introduce at least two new geeks to the music of Jonathan Coulton and/or Paul and Storm. If they for any reason don’t like them, I will try hard not to accuse them of not being true geeks.

4. Will try very, very hard not to be jealous of geeks who make it to San Diego Comic-Con or Penny Arcade Expo, if I’m unable to go to either.

5. Will try very hard to make sure my kids spend at least as much time reading as they do playing video games, even if that means occasionally buying or borrowing cringe-worthy novelizations of High School Musical or something similar, because even reading something lousy is better than not reading.

6. Will try very hard not to run out and buy an Apple iTablet, or iSlate, or whatever it ends up being called, as soon as it comes out. I will if necessary repeat this mantra to myself: “I don’t need it just because it’s new and cool.”

7. Will watch every new episode of Phineas and Ferb, with or without my kids, because it is the most awesomely geeky cartoon show currently on TV.

8. Will not try what I see on MythBusters at home, but will do everything possible to encourage my kids to (safely) examine their (and everyone else’s) assumptions with a skeptical and scientific eye.

9. Will not get into arguments with other geeks about the age-old PC vs. Mac or Windows vs. OS X vs. Linux questions, because nobody ever wins religious debates. [Reprinted from my resolutions from last year.]

10. Will, #9 notwithstanding, eagerly get into arguments with other geeks about the relatively new iPhone vs. Blackberry vs. Android vs. jailbroken iPhone question, because it hasn’t quite gotten to the point of being a religious debate… yet. And because such arguments often include trading phones for a few minutes, which is a lot of fun — especially if you can quickly figure out how to switch the other person’s phone’s display language to Russian.

If you haven’t yet, you should check out my fellow GeekDad Curtis Silver’s 12 Geeky New Year’s Resolutions.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Here’s a quick test to see if you’d enjoy the Voltron iPhone game: Do the phrases “Activate interlock!” and “Form feet and legs!” invoke feelings of nostalgia, and can you recite the next lines? If so, I can virtually guarantee this game is for you; if not, you’ll probably still enjoy it.

I loved the Voltron TV show when I was young. I was old enough to recognize that the plot was always pretty much the same in each episode, and to notice that it looked a little odd when characters would talk because only their mouths would move. When I say I loved Voltron, I mean of course that I loved the Lion Force version, because the Vehicle version was just not as good: there were too many characters to keep track of, and, let’s face it, a giant robot with lion heads for hands and feet is much cooler than one with cars and such. I never understood why nobody ever made a Voltron video game — I mean, it seemed like such an obvious idea.

But now, with the 25th anniversary of the show’s creation, a video game has finally appeared, and the good news is that it’s a mobile game, and that it’s really well-done. First, the game makers were smart enough to include some of the actual animation from the show, so when the game starts up and bookending each Robeast challenge, you’ll get a clip that will, if you’re anything like me, cause you to grin like a little kid. You can skip these cut scenes, but I can’t imagine why you’d want to.

The game plays like a series of episodes: In each “act” there are five “stages,” one for each lion, and then there’s a Robeast challenge. There’s written dialogue in each stage, which is just cheesy enough that it might actually have come straight from the show. There is some audio speech as well, mostly in the form of encouragement from the characters (e.g., Hunk saying “All right, there’s a job to be done. Let’s do it!”). There is a definite story arc through each act, and an overall arc as well; for instance, you start the game with Sven piloting the blue lion, which should provide some foreshadowing to anyone who watched the show as much as I did.

The game mechanics are very straightforward and easy to master: You have a set of four arrows on the left side of the screen which control the movement of the lion, and three action buttons that will fire a missile, use the lion’s paw to hit something or swat away an enemy missile, or invoke the lion’s special power. Each lion has a unique special power, which provides a nice distinction between the missions. In the Robeast challenges, you are of course playing Voltron as a whole, sword and all, so your available actions are to strike the Robeast (in two different ways), duck or shield against its attacks, or do a special attack once you build up energy to do it. Once you’ve defeated a Robeast, it will unlock in the “Zarkon Arena,” which you can access from the game’s main menu, allowing you to fight as the Robeasts themselves against one-another. There are also quite a few “achievements” you can unlock throughout the game, and the game even has Facebook integration should you want to boast about it to your friends.

The Voltron game for the iPhone / iPod Touch is $3.99 on the iTunes app store, and well worth the price. It’s a lot of fun for those of us who remember the show fondly, and for many of those who’ve never seen it at all — I let my kids play it a number of times, and they had a blast, too, despite having virtually no idea what the story was about.

Wired: A well-crafted game that’s both easy and fun to play. And the way it evokes the world of the old TV show made me grin every time I played it.

Tired: It would be nice if you could have more than one game going at a time. As it is, while you can go back and replay old missions, you can’t start the game fresh without wiping out all progress that’s been made. This makes it very difficult for two or more people to share the game on a given device.

(All screenshots are copyright Sony Pictures Television. I was not given a free copy of the game.)

A trailer for the game is included after the jump.

Arkanoid for iPhone, photo by Nathan Barry

One of my favourite old school games from the Commadore 64 era has found a new home in my pocket, courtesy of Tatio’s latest remake – Arkanoid for the iPhone and iPod Touch, available now from the US iTunes App Store for $4.99 and for £2.99 in the UK.

For those that haven’t played it before, the game is basically a fancy version of Breakout – you move your ‘Vaus’ ship left to right to bounce a ball up to the lines of bricks and knock them out one by one. There is a pretty lame backstory to explain what’s going on – the Arkanoid mothership is attacked and sends out the ‘Vaus’ on a recon mission to see what’s what, but it gets sucked into an inter-dimensional blah blah blah – but that’s really just uneccessary fluff and can be skipped over quite quickly.

Cover for the Atari ST version of Arkanoid, used under fair use via Wikipedia

The game takes the basic idea of Breakout and expands it by adding various power-ups ranging from enlongating and reducing your paddle width to multi-ball and a laser to blast away the bricks quicker. The level designs add some visual appeal and differing degrees of difficulty to the gameplay, and there are additional little ‘enemy’ ships that get in the way and add a bit of randomness to the path the ball can take.

I remember to original being one of the first games to take advantage of a new (at the time) way of controlling the onscreen action – the mouse. This made it much more responsive than the traditional joystick set up and allowed you to move the ‘vaus’ from one side of the screen to the other at great speed, much more like the paddle of the arcade version. This was especially useful if you happened to catch the ‘gate’ power-up, which jumped you to the next level, as you could just slide the mouse quickly to the right and not have to worry about the ball coming down before you got there.
It seems appropriate then that this new version is again making use of a relatively new input device – the iPhone’s touchscreen. To play, you simply hold your finger on the marker just below your craft and the little ship will follow your movements across the screen. Occasionly, I kept finding that my finger had strayed upwards and obscured the Vaus.This was a bit annoying, but I can’t have been the only one to do it as the controls still worked, and had obviously been designed to.

The first level of Arkanoid

A lot of the level designs seem to be exact copies of the originals. I remember so many of them so well (including the Space Invader one) but others may well be new. One of my all time favourites is still there. It’s bottom row is made from the ‘metallic’ blocks (which take a couple of hits to remove), all except the the last one, which also doesn’t have any blocks in the rows above it. A carefully aimed first shot can take it out. Get the ball back up there and it’ll start bouncing around taking out block after block. Luck out and catch a ‘disperse’ power up (the multi-ball) and you can rest, safe in the knowledge that the level will pretty much finish itself.

One thing that has been improved is the progression through the levels. Rather than simply going from a to b to c as in the original, the new version has adopted an inverted pyramid, branching structure, which will greatly improve the replay factor as you can take a different route and find other levels you might not have played before.

And one thing that has definitely gone in the other direction is the background music. Actually, I can’t say that for sure as I can’t remember what the music used to be, but I’m sure it wasn’t the lame euro-techno-disco-trance it is now. You can get around this by choosing your own tracks from the options screen, but this seems a little limiting. It would much better to just let the iPod play in the background. The FX are perfectly fine, adding a nice plinky-plonk to the music and the power-ups now announce themselves with a nice 80s Cylon effect.

A nice addition to this version is a versus mode which is pretty much Breakout x Pong. Two players, each with their own Vaus go head to head on the same screen with a few troublesome blocks getting in the way of pure Pong action.

Overall, it’s a great bit of retro gaming fun from the days when simple gameplay was more important than fancy 3D graphics and is well worth the $4.99/£2.99.

Tis the Season!

Congratulations to Doug Metz, winner of our 12th Day of Geekmas giveaway. Doug took home a $200 Sears gift card, a Star Wars iPhone case, a set of Musician’s Dice and the HP MediaSmart Server EX490. Moreover, he will forever be known as the grand champion of 12DoG ‘09!

Let us pause momentarily to bask in Doug’s glory, but let us not forget that the 12 Days of Geekmas project, in all its unmitigated geekitude, would not be possible without the support of our sponsors. As such, please join me thanking the following:

Adafruit Industries
Discovery Channel
Doctor Octoroc
Dual Core
Entertainment Earth
Hewlett-Packard
John Kovalic
Lev Grossman
Muzoricle
Sears
Starwars.com
Uncle Monsterface

Without these fine individuals/corporate entities, Geekmas would simply not be possible. Okay, maybe it would still be possible, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be as much fun!

Of course, the same can be said for you, our wonderful readers. If 2008 was a banner year for GeekDad, then 2009 was off the friggin’ charts. And while we’d like to think that our collective hard work had a lot to do with it, the truth is that your kind attention is the true engine of our progress.

You make GeekDad work, and our only regret is that we can’t favor each and every one of you with extravagant swag. So, though cold comfort it may be, allow me to wish you all the safest, happiest and most pleasant of holidays.

And Grodd bless us, every one.