I recommended it on our show last year and it went on to become a massive hit. Temple Run is back with a sequel offering better graphics and a bigger, meaner monkey. Plus with hockey season back on we’ll check on the updated NHL MediaCenter app and cool photography lessons from a Hollywood master.
Temple Run 2
Free
Having been chased by evil monkeys the first time, Temple Run 2 entices you to repeat the challenge, this time offering a jungle chase with tighter ducks, leaps, and jumps to better keep you on your toes and new visuals that enhance the thrill of being in motion. Oh, and a significantly larger and rather mean-looking monkey.
The upgraded graphics offer a sense of grandeur to the temple paths, especially with new sequences involving zip lines over floating islands and mine cart rides along precarious underground tracks. Expanded power-ups and unlockable explorer characters give a sense of fresh content, but admittedly if you play Temple Run 2 for just a few days you’ll quickly see all there is to see. It’s fun, yes, but Temple Run 3 will need to offer something really new to avoid losing the thrill.
NHL GameCenter
iPhone/iPad/Android/PS3/Xbox 360
Free/$4.99/$49.99
With a fresh update for the now truncated hockey season, this official app from the NHL is designed to offer streaming video access to your mobile devices and game consoles. For free you can watch game highlights, check the scores, read player profiles, and follow games with a live simulation. For $4.99 you can listen to radio broadcasts while $49.99 gives you access to live out-of-market game videos and on-demand content.
Unfortunately, it’s not working. Technical difficulties kept the video streams offline during the season’s first game this past Saturday. While the NHL has apologized, it does little to appease fans already unhappy from the lockout. The new update has also removed two popular features, the News and Twitter feeds, limiting the app’s use outside of watching video feeds.
If the NHL can resolve their problems, there is real value here. The video streams offer good controls with the ability to pause or watch clips in slow-motion and in addition to the out-of-market games there’s also content from the NHL vault. That’s if the NHL can resolve their problems.
Dale Grahn Color
$3.99
Every camera and photo-editing program has settings of some kind for contrast, saturation, and exposure, but how many people really know how to use them? Dale Grahn can teach you. He’s the man who has colour-corrected all of Steven Spielberg’s movies and a number of films for Woody Allen, Ridley Scott, and Pixar amongst others.
His app is aimed at the most basic of users. He gives you a set of simple, colour-correcting tools and video tutorials that will take you by hand through basic adjustments like applying a tint or sepia tone to your photo or balancing out the image to give it the natural feel of real life.
He includes sample photos for you to play with and an easy comparison tool so you can measure your work against his and quickly see where you’ve gone wrong. When you think you’ve got it, you can also import in your own photographs for improvement.
We all have the desire to be better photographers, but that often seems like such an overwhelming and involved goal. Dale Grahn’s tutorials share his mastery in a way that is easy to follow and rewarding in explaining the why as much as the how of bringing out your photograph’s best elements.
