Down in the garden there is a war being fought … slowly. Two armies of slugs face each other across the battlefield, each determined to break into the opponent’s base. Armed with acorn guns and salt shakers, they race—er, trudge—into the fray.

Slug Wars is a new real-time strategy game for the iPhone and iPod touch, a little reminiscent of Plants vs. Zombies, but with both offense and defense. Instead of just defending your own base, the goal is to get three of your slugs into the enemy base. You queue up various types of slugs, each with its own abilities and cost, and when they meet the opposing line they do battle. Get all the way across the field, and your slug enters the enemy base.

There’s a campaign mode pitting you against the computer, and winning unlocks new slugs to add to your arsenal. You start with the Soldier (very basic but fairly fast) and the Tank (slower, but can shoot from farther away). Eventually you get such slugs as the Kamikaze (with a salt-shaker strapped to its back) or the Airborne, carried by a butterfly over the heads of the other slugs. You earn more funds by defeating slugs and by picking up flowers that sprout up on the field, and the trick is balancing firepower and speed with your available funds.

Skirmish mode is just a one-time battle against the computer, and Slug-It-Out pits you against a friend. There aren’t really any options to speak of: just turning sound effects on or off. There’s also a brief tutorial in case you need some help getting started.

The Slug Wars battlefield

The controls are very simple: dial the wheel at the bottom of the screen to select a slug, and then tap the lane where you would like to spawn the slug. Since some of the heavy-duty slugs are slower and cost more, you have to balance them with the faster Soldiers to gain ground and pick up flowers.

The graphics are great, with different color palettes for the opposing armies. The character designs are funny. Aside from the Kamikaze, who douses himself and the nearest enemy with a pile of salt, there’s the Nuke, sipping a cup of salted seltzer water—when he explodes, he wipes out half the screen, both enemies and friendlies. The sound effects are decent but nothing especially exciting (mostly some battle sounds, and each type of slug has its own battle cry as it enters the field).

While some of the earlier levels took me a little longer to beat, I found that the difficulty level didn’t really keep pace with me. Most games I won three to zilch; the one time I lost (right after the Missile slug was introduced) the score was two to three. Probably playing against another person would be a little more interesting because their strategy would vary some. I found I was generally getting by with only four or five of the eight available slugs, and I was starting to lose interest in the game. I’ve gotten up to level 35 with the computer rarely getting a single score, and even that mostly just to see if it was going to get any harder. (It doesn’t seem to.)

A few other minor quibbles I had: you can actually start deploying slugs before it says “Ready, Fight!” so for a while the computer was getting a few slugs on the field before I was ready. Also, I did find that the slug-selection dial was a little, well, sluggish for me. (Note that I’m using a first-generation iPod touch so I know the processor speed on this is a bit slower than the newer versions.) Also, there wasn’t a very clear indicator of progress in the campaign, other than a small label at the bottom of the screen during the fight. It would have been nice to see that on the splash screen, perhaps, and maybe some statistics would be fun as well.

That said, until I had gotten all the slugs, it was fun trying to decide on a strategy and discovering the new slugs. If you’re a fan of tower defense games, this is certainly worth trying out, but you may want to find a partner because I didn’t find the AI particularly intelligent—I’ve settled on a strategy that seems to be unbeatable against the computer. They do promise to release more slug units in future updates, so I’m looking forward to see what they come up with.

Slug Wars is $1.99 in the App Store, and you can visit the Republic of Fun website for more information.

Wired: Amusing take on tower defense games that throws in offensive strategy; great graphics and character design.

Tired: Computer doesn’t put up much of a fight; bare-bones options.

Disclosure: I received a free download of Slug Wars to review.

Battle Blasters title screen and character selection screen.

The year is 3042, which of course means that there are death match tournaments. Fighters across the world strap blasters to their arms and shoot it out for fame and glory—or at least a high score on the Facebook Leaderboards.

Battle Blasters for the iPhone and iPod Touch is an arcade-style one-on-one shoot-out. There are six different unlockable characters, each with different speed, defense, power and abilities. The controls are pretty simple: swipe to the side to move, forward to shoot at the enemy, down to block, and tap your character to activate your special ability. The trick is learning the strengths and weaknesses of the various characters, and eliminating them as quickly as possible.

The campaign mode is reminiscent of old-school fighting games like Street Fighter: you pick a character, then battle your way through all the characters (fighting your doppelganger, of course), each with their own background setting. The last opponent is B.R.O.C., a massive robot who freezes you and then unleashes a hail of bullets. Each fight is best-out-of-three, and ends with the victor making some quip about the fight. (Some are more amusing than others, but with a limited repertoire they do get repetetive.) You also get very detailed stats about the fight for both you and your opponent: shots fired, accuracy, shots deflected, etc.

Quickplay lets you choose your player and opponent for practice. Multiplayer is interesting: since controlling your character only requires half of the screen, you can actually play against a friend on one iPhone. However, because it’s not a true top-down perspective, Player Two has to work upside down. (The biggest thing you’ll need to watch for is sharp fingernails!) I’ve been informed that Online Multiplayer is in the works for a future update.

Fight stage and post-battle quip.

You start the game with only Easy mode and one character, Jerett (that handsome bald guy in the blue armor). Beating the campaign unlocks a difficulty level and another character. So far I’ve beaten Easy, Medium and Hard, but Supreme has proven to be beyond my abilities; although it appears that B.R.O.C. will be the reward for doing so.

It really does feel somewhat like an homage to Street Fighter, with its colorful manga-esque in-game charcaters (and the more detailed portraits before and after the fights). However, unlike Street Fighter there isn’t any pretense of a plotline here. You have a blaster, you’re trying to shoot everyone else. Who needs a story?

It’s mostly kid-safe as long as you don’t mind the idea of people with guns where their arms should be. There’s no blood and gore, just glowing balls of light. But for kids who have grown up with first-person shooters, this may be a little too simple. It may in fact be more popular with people like me, nostalgic for old Sega games. (I did, after all, play it enough to beat three difficulty levels, and I’ll probably keep trying to beat Supreme.) The increased difficulty levels and unlocked characters add replay value, but it does start getting repetitive. I haven’t played much of the two-player version, but that would certainly add some interest to the opponent.

Battle Blasters is $2.99 at the Apple iTunes Store.

Wired: Fun old-school shooter game; two-player mode on one device; nice variation in character abilities; easy-to-learn controls.

Tired: May be too simple for your kids (but that means they won’t be stealing your iPhone to play it, right?); until online multiplayer is available, it might not keep replay value for long.

Disclosure: GeekDad was provided with a free download of Battle Blasters for review.

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.

Erfworld: The Battle for Gobwin Knob

Okay, I know, “Geekiest Comic Ever” is a big claim to make, considering there are other comics like “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.” But I had to get your attention somehow, right? And Erfworld is incredibly geeky in a fantastic way. (As opposed to geeky in a sci-fi way.) Here’s the plot: in the magical realm of Erfworld, the Overlord Stanley the Plaid has basically killed off all his warlords in battle due to poor strategy. His spell-caster Wanda suggests they buy a spell which will summon the perfect warlord from anywhere in the universe, a military genius who will save them from certain defeat. So they cast the spell and who should appear but Parson, an overweight strategy gamer from Columbus, Ohio.

Parson reminds me a little of the character Eli Wallace on SGU. Here’s a man-child who is obsessed with spaceships and science fiction, and he finds himself on a starship hurtling through space. Yes, it’s a bit worrying and, yes, they could all die. But he’s on a frikkin’ spaceship! Parson is a bit like that, only with a gaming obsession: he finds himself inside a world similar to his strategy games. And while it takes him a while to accept that it’s actually happening to him, he quickly warms to the task and starts plotting strategy. (And this even after he realizes that Stanley the Plaid is, to put it bluntly, the bad guy. Parson doesn’t mind.)

Riding a "dwagon" to Gobwin Knob.

The comic was originally published online under a Creative Commons license, and you can still read Book One: The Battle for Gobwin Knob online. (I will warn you: when I first went to check out Erfworld to see what it was about, I wound up reading the entirety of Book One in one sitting, staying up until about 2 a.m.) There are all sorts of tongue-in-cheek allusions: from Charlie’s Angels to the Eyebooks, magic books which the characters use to communicate with each other via a system which is, well, instant messaging, complete with a “Quack” noise when a new message is received.

The sound effects are absurd and hilarious: from the “Fer-Durrrp!” of the bugles to random words reinterpreted as onomatopoeia: “Golem!” for the appearance of, well, Golems, and “Decrypt!” as the sound of somebody being raised from the dead. The names of things are cutesy: “dwagons” and “gwiffins,” and they all look cute, too, even the giant vicious teddy bears. But then, in the midst of all the adorable stuff a warlord gets an arrow through his head, or a giant marshmallow peep gets bitten in half by a dwagon. The artwork is a good match for the writing, with its own mixture of bitter and sweet.

Android users, scan this barcode for the Erfworld app

It’s hard to describe the breadth of geekiness contained in Erfworld; I’m not even a strategy gamer but it sucked me in. And now, thanks to Robot Comics, it’s available as an app for the iPhone, iPod touch, or Android phone. The first episode is available for free, and later episodes will be available for $.99 each, released one per month. (Book One will be broken into 13 episodes, and the first two are available now.)

And for those of you who have already read Erfworld Book One, Book Two is now well underway on the website.

Wired: The best sort of humor: one that satirizes and embraces its subject matter at the same time. Robot Comics’ app has an easy-to-use interface and allows you to read Erfworld on the go.

Tired: You may not want to wait a month per episode once you start reading.

HippoDict: Chinese-English Dictionary for iPhone

When I was considering retiring my Palm TX in exchange for an iPod touch (no AT&T service in the rural area where I live, so no iPhone), one of my essential applications was a good Chinese dictionary. I speak Chinese fairly fluently but I’m not very literate; although I know how to use a dead-tree dictionary, it’s so much easier being able to simply write the character. And when I’m trying to teach my kids Chinese, occasionally we run into words I don’t recognize, or English phrases that I don’t know the right Chinese words for. (Side note: How would you organize a dictionary in a language with no alphabet? How do you look up a word in such a dictionary? It’s actually quite an interesting system, but perhaps the subject of a later post.)

Search by Character

I was given the chance to try out HippoDict, a Chinese Dictionary for the iPhone or iPod touch. HippoDict runs on the public domain CC-CEDICT dictionary, which has over 80,000 entries and can display in either Simplified or Traditional characters. More than the 20,000+ entries of many “starter” dictionaries but far fewer than the 240,000 claimed by the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (my paper dictionary of choice), the CC-CEDICT is a bit like Wikipedia: fine for everyday use but possibly a little less rigorous if you’re doing some serious research. I found that it serves me pretty well and I haven’t come across words I wanted to look up which weren’t in the dictionary.

You can search using English, pinyin, zhuyin, or writing the characters: this is actually integrated with the iPhone’s own OS language abilities, which are much better than the Palm’s. If you have an iPhone, you can simply turn on the Chinese language settings from the settings menu to enable handwriting recognition for characters or pinyin and zhuyin input. Once you look up a word, it shows the Chinese character, English definition, and pronunciations in both pinyin and zhuyin. It also gives you the option of finding other words and phrases which contain the entry. In the case of phrases, it gives you a short definition of each word in the phrase. There are also built-in links to various other dictionary sites (Dict.cn, Google Dictionary, MDBG, Nciku, and YellowBridge) although I rarely ventured further than the basic page.

Customizable Flashcards

One other option available is flashcards, which allows you to store entries in your choice of decks, and then train yourself with a SuperMemo-type program. You go through the cards, and mark which ones you recognize; the next time through, it quizzes you more often on ones you missed. For myself, one handy use was creating a flashcard deck of family relationship titles. (Did you know there are different words for “father’s older brother” and “father’s younger brother”?) It comes in handy when I’m writing letters to my various aunts and uncles in Chinese and need to make sure I’m writing everything correctly.

It’s a pretty speedy dictionary, although I admit I don’t have much to compare it to other than my Palm which is admittedly totally outclassed by the iPod touch. It starts up quickly (even compared to some of my other iPod apps) and searching feels instantaneous without long wait times. HippoDict is available for $9.99 on the iTunes store, which puts it in the higher price range for iPhone apps but is still a few bucks less than most paper dictionaries.

The one thing I wish HippoDict had was a large view of the character. It’s something my Palm’s dictionary had, so you could get a better view of the character. HippoDict’s display is far from tiny, but it would nice to be able to zoom in a bit for the more complicated characters.

HippoDict Detailed Entry

I will mention the one other Chinese dictionary I’ve tried for the iPhone is the DianHua Dictionary: it’s a free app with a paid add-on module which will pronounce words for you. DianHua also runs on the CC-CEDICT database so its contents are much the same, but the interface is generally clunkier. However, it does have an “inspect character” feature which puts the character in full-screen. I’ve generally been using the HippoDict for most of my searches; if they put in a full-screen feature in a future update I would probably drop DianHua.

Wired: Quick startup and searching, handwriting character recognition, and flashcards to train yourself.

Tired: Not as comprehensive as the Oxford C-E Dictionary, but sufficient for most everyday use. A magnify option would be nice.

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.

The app starts, as it should, by asking for your name, having you find a suitable wand, and then sorting you into a Hogwarts house. The Sorting Hat does not, as I had thought it might, automatically put you in Gryffindor, which I would guess to be most kids’ desired house, but seems to choose mostly randomly: I tried eight times, and the only house I wasn’t sorted into was Slytherin, which could well be purposeful on the part of the game’s programmers. After that, you have to learn your spells.

The game has fourteen spells, including the ones you would expect (e.g., Expelliarmus and Expecto Patronum) and a few you probably wouldn’t (e.g., Episkey and Oppugno). Each is cast by holding the iPhone (or iPod Touch) parallel to the floor and making a particular gesture, unique to each spell. This I found to be the hardest part of the app, primarily because the tutorial did not adequately explain how the gestures were to be made. It had seemed to me that the gestures were supposed to be made as though seen from above, whereas they’re actually supposed to be made as though the iPhone were chalk and you were writing on a blackboard. Once the folks who made the game sent me a video explaining that, it made things significantly less frustrating for me.

Casting "Incendio"

Once you’ve learned all the spells (you have to learn them one at a time, as each unlocks the next), you can practice them or engage in a duel. If you have a second device, which I sadly do not, you can duel between them, firing attack spells to defeat your opponent or using defensive and healing spells to stop your opponent defeating you. If you don’t, you can duel against a computer-controlled opponent, which is fun for a few times but quickly gets a bit tiresome.

Learning and practicing the spells shows some neat animation, unique to each spell, and makes the device speak the spell’s name (as though it were being cast). In a nice feature, the app lets you record your own voice saying the spell if you want to, though you can just use the default voice, which is a female voice with a British accent. This is the same voice that tells you when you’ve cast the spell correctly each time in lessons or practice, or gently tells you that “you failed” (which I got really tired of hearing before receiving the casting advice, let me tell you).

The Harry Potter Spells app (iTunes link) goes for $2.99 on the iTunes App Store, and you can find out a lot more information (including a spell-casting help video) at the official website.

Wired: The ability to cast spells with the iPhone was, perhaps, the only thing iPhones had been missing. Dueling with another person seems like it would be a lot of fun. My kids, who are huge Harry Potter fans, had a great time playing with it.

Tired: The instructions included with the app lacked clarity. Without a second device (with a second $2.99 copy of the app, of course), dueling gets boring quickly.

(Screenshots used with permission of Warner Bros. Digital Distribution. FCC Disclosure: I received a free review copy of the app.)