App Reviews: History of Ireland, Ridiculous Fishing, Face Stealer
A History Of Ireland In 100 Objects
Free (Until End of March)
A gift from Ireland to the world on St. Patrick’s day, this virtual tour of one hundred exquisite artifacts includes St. Patrick’s Bell, which was handed down as an heirloom through generations of the Mulholland family, and St. Patrick’s Confession, the first written account of an Irishman’s life and a look at the man who would become the father of Irish Christianity.
Assembled by the National Museum of Ireland, The Irish Times, and the Royal Irish Academy, this interactive timeline paints a large picture of the country’s history and culture, starting with Mesolithic fishing gear and axe heads from 6,000 years ago and moving through the ages to the rise of Ireland as the main producer of microprocessors for Intel today.
With a mix of text, audio, video, and scanned imagery, including a flag that ripples and moves across the screen, you’ll find Viking swords, Celtic brooches, hunting/drinking horns, and iron slave chains. There are unique items of extraordinary value, such as the Book of Kells and King William’s gauntlets, and common items of significant influence, such as a wicker cradle from the population boom of the 1800’s and a 1950’s washing machine which revolutionized working class life. The last object in the collection, rather poignantly, is a decommissioned AK-47, signifying the peace achieved between the IRA and the British government.
Ridiculous Fishing – A Tale of Redemption
$2.99
If you think deep sea fishing means using a stick of dynamite or a hand grenade, you might just be a re- ..well, a ridiculous fishermen. This is a game in which you play an old curmudgeon named Billy who likes to retreat to a lake where he can be alone and just fish. He tries to catch as many fish as he can on his line at once so he can toss the entire catch high up into the air and blow them all away, Duck Hunt-style.
Your job is to help him by tilting your screen left-and-right to guide his lure as deep as possible, avoiding tangles and jellyfish, and collecting as many different kinds of fish on the way back up.
Although it’s a violent game, not intended for kids, it somehow gets away with it through the charm of old-school, 8-bit computer game graphics, an engaging sense of humour, and over-the-top gags. Billy is surrounded by a peanut gallery of seagulls, seals, and dolphins that like to send him comments and wisecracks through a Twitter-like service called Byrdr while an included fishing guide identifies types of fish as “hard to spell” or “was my friend once”.
Successful fishing will earn you game dollars for the store to unlock chainsaw lures, toaster bobbers, bazookas, and lucky hats. It’s a fun and funny game that manages to remain so even after hours of play.
Humour is such a rare commodity in the market of video games. Game designers tend to avoid it because it can be divisive and difficult pull off. Ridiculous Fishing shows that as long as you care about your characters and include a light touch with the gags, you can be funny and take risks that make it worthwhile.
Face Stealer
Free
From Yahoo Japan comes this rather odd app that lets you capture another person’s face and then wear it as your own. It uses face recognition to pinpoint the main characteristics of a face from a photograph including the eyes, nose, lips, and chin, and then copies them as animated parts that are mapped to your own face when you look into your device’s camera.
Thanks to a blending effect that uses your own skin tone and a flexibility of the mask created, the results work well enough to have some fun with. You can smile, life your eyebrows, and even open your mouth to talk, letting change expressions and act up for the camera with your new face. After some practice to get your moves down, you can take a picture or video to share the results online.
There are three ways of getting a new face. There’s a set of pre-made masks you can try for Barack Obama, the Mona Lisa, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig Van Beethoven amongst others or you can create your own by typing in any name you can think of and selecting an image from Yahoo’s Image Search. Celebrities, popular characters, even animals, if their photo is on the web you can use it as long as it’s a good shot and you use the app’s simple face-tracking tools to pick out their main features.
Lastly you can use the camera in your device to snap a picture of a friend and “steal” their face if you like. Some faces work better than others, and it takes some experimentation to get custom masks right, but with good lighting and some mime skills you can create photos are strangely, creepily, amusing.
