Milekeeper
Free
With Milekeeper you’re no longer cycling through the city, you’re participating in the Tour de France. The running path in the nearby park now becomes the length of the Great Wall of China and your local pool becomes a chance for you to swim the English Channel. Using your phone’s sensors and GPS, this app tracks your mileage from your fitness runs and records it against virtual maps representing the real world distances of famed physical challenges.
Of course you don’t complete these goals in one go, but rather accumulate your distances over time. For each challenge the app will generate statistics across a calendar, add in a music playlist, and let you share your progress with Facebook friends. The first selection of routes are free, the rest cost $0.99 – $1.99 each.
I like that you can use Milekeeper as an add-on for your existing fitness tracker, running on your phone alongside so as not to compete, and that it can be used for a variety of activities such as roller-blading, boating, driving, and even distances covered by wheelchair (the first app I’ve seen to do so). It’s a novel idea and thankfully the app keeps it simple.
Efexio
Free/$1.99 creatures
From fire-breathing dragons to dancing penguins, Efexio will add digital monsters to your home-made movies thanks to animations supplied by Hollywood creature-maker Phil Tippett. Sadly, this won’t include the AT-AT Snow Walkers or Mon Calamarian aliens he created for Empire Strikes Back, nor the werewolves he made for the Twilight movies, but for $1.99 each, you can grab copyright-free robots, zombies, and dinosaurs to play with.
Unlike J.J. Abrams’ Action Movie FX app, which offers quick gags you can master in seconds, Efexio is aimed at aspiring filmmakers and offers detailed controls for sizing, positioning, shading, and even lighting the creatures to match your background footage. Even with tutorial videos to take your through the process, it still takes patience. iPad users will have a much easier time using a big screen than iPhone users where the controls can become lost on the smaller display.
Zombie Vacation by Corey Rosen
Of course if you dream of making movies, learning the process is part of the fun and since the app launched last week, many have uploaded their first movies already. These shorts featuring kids battling zombies are my favourite.
Kids Fight Zombies by Michael Cavanaugh
Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded
$4.99/$9.99
Thanks to nostalgic fans, who donated more than $600,000 to Kickstarter, we now have a remastered edition of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. The raunchy desktop adventure was an unexpected delight in 1987, welcomed by both gamers and casual players for injecting a sense of mischief into an environment of boring spreadsheets and word processors. The game became particularly famous for trying to block young players with a test of trivia questions on decades before their time, and although it featured no nudity, just double-entendres and sleazy innuendo, it’s themes of drinking, gambling, and sexual pursuits made it an adults-only title, and so even more tempting to play.
The trivia question age test is still here in this touchscreen edition, which has been given considerable polish with film-quality animation and voices to punch up the crude humour. A few gags that were dated have been replaced with some fresh ones (including an Angry Birds reference), but the material is the same, just faster to play and easier to control (and thanks to Google easier to find the answers when you’re stuck).
Now in his forties, Larry Laffer is looking to change his virgin status with a trip to “Lost Wages” where you must help him navigate a world of bar flies, gamblers, and scam artists to seek out that one lucky lady who won’t shut him down for his hapless antics. You’ll need to keep his breath fresh, win him taxi money from the gambling machines, and collect objects that will turn each goose chase the locals send him on into a clever plan that gets him back on the right path.
Now that it’s animated and with actors delivering the lines, the humour should work better, right? And yet the years have not been kind to Larry. The shock value of his adventure is gone and so the crude humour is just… crude. “Reloaded” holds more value as a nostalgic adventure today than a comedic one and if you’re not familiar with the original, you probably won’t understand what the fuss is about.
