Toy Sol­diers by Sig­nal Studios

Toy Sol­diers is a tower defense game, although none of its pro­mo­tional mate­ri­als con­tain the words “tower” or “defense.” This was prob­a­bly a cal­cu­lated deci­sion, as the tower defense genre is over­crowded with copy­cat clones and mediocre me-toos. But for clas­si­fi­ca­tion pur­poses, Toy Sol­diers is tower defense. It’s also one of the good tower defense games, so fans of the genre will want to check it out (there are tower defense fans out there, right?).

Play­ers return to their days of youth spent lying on the bed­room floor, recon­struct­ing epic bat­tles with plas­tic toys strewn from wall to wall. This isn’t a real­is­tic war sim­u­la­tion. Instead, you’ll find car­toon­ish, exag­ger­ated sol­diers that explode into plas­tic bits and gigan­tic table lamps loom­ing over the bat­tle­field. Your goal on each map is to defend your toy box from wave after wave of oncom­ing troops and vehi­cles. To do so you build defenses at spe­cific build sites around the map. In order to build you have to be able to afford the con­struc­tion, and money is earned from every kill.

One fea­ture that sets Toy Sol­diers apart from other tower defense games is the abil­ity to take con­trol of any tow­ers and mow down the enemy on your own. You can zoom-in to the weapon’s point of view, use the left stick to aim and the right to fire. There are also oppor­tu­ni­ties to pilot pow­er­ful vehi­cles like bombers and super tanks. In this way the game is well-suited to both thought­ful, strate­gic gamers and those look­ing for a more action-packed expe­ri­ence. On the hard­est dif­fi­culty, though, your tow­ers won’t fire on their own — if any ene­mies are going to be defeated, it will only be at your hands. That means you have to con­stantly jump from tower to tower, and if you take a break to build some­thing, no bad guys are being killed. Good luck with that.

While Toy Sol­diers boasts impres­sive vis­tas and epic con­flicts, your arse­nal is pretty mea­ger. There are only six units at your dis­posal, mean­ing your strate­gic options are some­what lim­ited. I under­stand if the devel­oper was going for a more stream­lined, action-focused strat­egy game, but I could have used more vari­ety to work with.

Despite this minor gripe I found Toy Sol­diers to be quite enjoy­able and was always eager to see what the next level had in store. The maps are all var­ied and every few stages you’ll have to defeat an impres­sive, giant boss. There are spe­cific sec­ondary objec­tives on each map that encour­age you to try dif­fer­ent tech­niques you may not have thought of. For instance, you may be asked to save up a cer­tain amount of money or snipe a tar­get num­ber of soldiers.

Zoom­ing around the bat­tle­field is a breeze thanks to an optional bird’s-eye view and the abil­ity to speed up your cur­sor by hold­ing the left trig­ger. But while down in the bat­tle­field I found the fixed cam­era angle a lit­tle inad­e­quate at times. You can swing the cam­era around in 360 degrees and tilt it up and down — to a cer­tain degree. But I would have appre­ci­ated more con­trol to get a feel for my surroundings.

Toy Sol­diers includes a two-player ver­sus mode, playable locally in split screen or online. Here, each side sends waves of sol­diers at the oppo­nent with the Y but­ton — but they also have to build units in order to defend their toy box from the waves being sent by the oppo­nent. It’s a fun lit­tle diver­sion that will extend your Toy Sol­diers expe­ri­ence a short while after you’ve com­pleted the cam­paign (which will take you sev­eral hours on nor­mal difficulty).

His­tory of Jazz app for the iPad

Some­times I wish I was a music reviewer. There are a few things in life that I hold as being too “sacred” for me to write about because I’d never do it jus­tice, or I’d ulti­mately end up hat­ing some­thing that I love too much. Music is one of those things. When I’m not off try­ing to track down inter­est­ing post top­ics for this par­tic­u­lar web­site, I’m usu­ally try­ing to track down new music. Peo­ple who know me well, know what I’m talk­ing about.

It’s not very often that the two pas­sions in my life inter­sect with each other, and I actu­ally pre­fer it that way, but this His­tory of Jazz appli­ca­tion that I was asked to review has me all worked up.

I haven’t had this appli­ca­tion for more than 12 hours, and I can’t help myself. I really wanted to get this out as soon as pos­si­ble and share it with every­one. A cou­ple of years back I took a His­tory of Rock N’ Roll course in col­lege as my last elec­tive. The course was awe­some, but some­thing always felt like it was miss­ing. Read­ing about the music, and lis­ten­ing to record­ings on cas­sette tapes (yup, I took the course in 2009) pro­vided only half of what the course should have offered. Track­ing influ­ences from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion through­out the text was a bit of a chore. The course was excel­lent, but it could have far exceeded expec­ta­tions had the course direc­tor actu­ally taken the time to bring the cur­ricu­lum up to date with new tech­nolo­gies. This His­tory of Jazz appli­ca­tion is every­thing my His­tory of Rock and Roll course should have been. I’m not exaggerating—this appli­ca­tion is fantastic.

What’s Mac­gas­mic about His­tory of Jazz

Being able to start at the begin­ning, with Rag­time, and progress through time beyond Bebop, Cool Jazz, until Nu Jazz and beyond is price­less. Hav­ing a visual record at your fin­ger­tips is only half of the equa­tion though. The His­tory of Jazz appli­ca­tion also pro­vides you with other insights in the form of videos and arti­cles on selected top­ics. So you not only get to read about artists and styles, but you also get to see the orig­i­nal musi­cians play­ing some of their best songs. It’s not cov­ers and ren­di­tions by mod­ern musicians—the videos are actu­ally the peo­ple you’re learn­ing about, and that’s pretty huge. As an aside, the videos are all from YouTube, so you could both have some dif­fi­culty in the future, and find them on that web­site. I noticed one or two videos didn’t work, so it appears that they’re pulling the videos from YouTube directly. As long as the RIAA doesn’t go all crazy with the take down notices, you should be alright.

The fun doesn’t end there though. The His­tory of Jazz appli­ca­tion also has iTunes tie-ins that let you down­load albums and songs from the artists you’re lis­ten­ing to or watch­ing  video of from driectly within the appli­ca­tion. So if you’re enjoy­ing the groove the musi­cians are lay­ing down, you can buy up parts of their cat­a­log and lis­ten to it in iTunes or on your iPod.

What could use some polish

The application’s user inter­face is very modal. While it looks great and illus­trates its pur­pose quite well, I often found myself swip­ing and drag­ging sec­tions of the app where they clearly didn’t intend me to. Instead of stay­ing idle, pages would close or new sec­tions would open. It wasn’t a big deal at first, but when try­ing to fig­ure out how to expand an arti­cle for the first time, it becomes a lit­tle bit tedious hav­ing to re-open my page. That’s really the only thing I had a hard time with while using this application.

Final thoughts

As you can prob­a­bly tell from my post, I absolutely love this appli­ca­tion. I would love it if they expanded their appli­ca­tion library to include Rock N’ Roll, and Rhythm and Blues his­to­ries.  If they man­age to put out that con­tent in this par­tic­u­lar for­mat I’ll buy both imme­di­ately.  If you’re inter­ested in Jazz, or gen­uinely curi­ous about music his­tory, then this appli­ca­tion is for you.

With ArtRage you can export from your iPad to the desk­top version

For me, review­ing a paint­ing App on the iPad would be sim­i­lar to hav­ing Charles Barkley as a judge on Danc­ing with the Stars. It’s slightly out of my com­fort zone.  With that being said, it’s hard not to be impressed with ArtRage for the iPad.  A beau­ti­ful app that really shows off the flex­i­bil­ity of the iPad and reminds us of the power of a touch screen dis­play. For $6.99,  ArtRage deliv­ers a nearly true-to-life artis­tic expe­ri­ence, minus the cost of sup­plies and the mess that would likely ensue if you unleashed a non-artist like me on a can­vas and fin­ger paints.

Pros

• Inex­pen­sive. Costs only US$25 for down­load or $50 for a boxed version.
• User-friendly and very easy to learn. Great way to exper­i­ment with dig­i­tal art.
• Allows you to load an image as your can­vas or as “trac­ing paper” for paint­ing over.
• Lay­ers sup­port, Pho­to­shop PSD import and export.
• Ver­sion 2.5 adds new tools and layer improvements.

Cons

• Some­times brush strokes lag behind the cursor.
• No multi-monitor support.
• Lacks some tools you’d expect. Some I’d like to see are water­color, sponges, and masks.

Descrip­tion

• Paint and draw with oils, pen­cil, air­brush, mark­ers, chalk, crayon, palette knife, glit­ter, roller, tube, eraser, & stencils.
• Tools func­tion like their real-world coun­ter­parts and can be adjusted for var­i­ous effects (wet­ness, soft­ness, angle, etc.).
• Styl­ish, un-intimidating, easy-to-learn user inter­face. Includes thor­ough User Man­ual (PDF).
• Load a trac­ing image and paint over it with or with­out auto color selec­tion. “Pin” a ref­er­ence photo to your workspace.
• Import an image as your can­vas, then paint or color on it–or smear col­ors with the palette knife.
• Use pre­set can­vas tex­tures or adjust grain, color, rough­ness, scale, opac­ity, and metal effects to cre­ate your own.
• Metal­lic paint option makes any color into a metal­lic. Work with metal­lic oils, glit­ter, and shiny back­ground textures.
• Tool palettes are easy to use. Palettes hide them­selves auto­mat­i­cally when you paint near them.
• Work with lay­ers, includ­ing 23 layer blend modes. Import & export lay­ered PSD files for Pho­to­shop compatibility.

• New: Layer improve­ments, smooth blender, pre­cise pen­cil, sten­cils for draw­ing shapes, lines, and curves.

Guide Review — ArtRage 2.5 Paint­ing Soft­ware for Win­dows and Mac

ArtRage is an inex­pen­sive, easy-to-learn art pro­gram for Win­dows and Mac that is tons of fun to play with. As the devel­op­ers say, you can play with paint with­out any of the mess or the expen­sive sup­plies. If you’re not sure whether dig­i­tal art is for you, ArtRage Free Ver­sion is a nice, no-cost way to find out. Chances are, you’ll be hooked, and the $25 upgrade price for the full ver­sion opens up more tools and features.

ArtRage 2 intro­duced four new tools: air­brush, glit­ter, paint tube, and paint roller. The full ver­sion offers full lay­ers sup­port includ­ing all 23 of Photoshop’s stan­dard layer blend modes. In ArtRage 2.5, the layer fea­tures were expanded to include layer groups and bet­ter Pho­to­shop com­pat­i­bil­ity. Also a sten­cils and rulers fea­ture was added for draw­ing pre­cise shapes and lines. The pro­gram includes sev­eral fun and prac­ti­cal sten­cils, and users can also cre­ate their own. Ambi­ent Design’s Web site offers sev­eral tuto­ri­als and a user forum to help you learn the pro­gram and inter­act with other users.

ArtRage is per­fect if you have a child who’s inter­ested in explor­ing com­puter art; even very young chil­dren should have no prob­lem pick­ing it up. As soon as I tried the glit­ter tool it brought me back to kinder­garten and mak­ing art with glue and metal­lic glit­ter. With ArtRage, there’s no glue mess and you won’t have to worry about your kid eat­ing the foil glitter.

ArtRage is equally fun for adults–and edu­ca­tional, too. If you own a graph­ics tablet or tablet PC, you absolutely need to have this pro­gram. Go ahead and spring for the full version–it’s totally worth it!

ArtRage can be pur­chased from the devel­oper as a down­load or in a boxed ver­sion from Smith Micro (com­pare prices below).