The words “impulse buy” are special to me because of my good friend Tong who always encourages me to “yo, impulse buy that sh*t”. Well, this time I did.
After posting about Canabalt a few days ago I suddenly lost three dollars and ended up with the game on my home screen. However, to make matters worse our very own Patrick Jordan e-mailed me last night talking about some app called “iGmail” and how it was better than all of the provinces of Canada put together (okay, so I played with his wording just a little). Moral of the story? iGmail suddenly plopped itself right beside Canabalt and my bank account complained about another two dollars going missing.
I’m usually a lot more careful about app purchases, so I’m actually feeling a little giddy about these latest purchases.
The good news is that I’m pretty darn happy with both of these impulse purchases. Canabalt is so ridiculously atmospheric in the first 20 seconds of gameplay (if you make it that far) that I just had to support the devs. $2.99 is actually a little bit of a premium (App Store-wise) for a game that really does only one thing and never, ever lets you win. Doodle Jump and Minigore are similar “survive as long as you can” kind of games — but the reason I bought Canabalt was for the experience. When you first boot up you have no idea what’s chasing you, if anything is chasing you, or why the hell people would just leave boxes on rooftops…but it doesn’t matter. The adrenaline rush kicks in anyway once the music gets going and the screen starts shaking. I play a lot of games on the PC, on my portable consoles, and sometimes on my iPhone — and I think it’s an amazing achievement to create such an immersive experience so quickly, without any dialogue or characters. Canabalt is just sick and even though I always end up losing it’s still a victory for gaming.
As for iGmail, well I’m actually surprised that it took this long for someone to release an app with this title. This one has full-screen view, a huge text editing area that you can scroll through with two fingers, a quasi accelerometer lock, and it always keeps the entire Gmail interface loaded so that only your inbox has to be re-downloaded (three second total load time). I’m trying to use iGmail combined with Mailtones (review here) to create a decent alternative to the default Mail application. Stay tuned for the upcoming review 😀
Anybody else have a recent good (or bad) impulse buy to share?
Continue reading:
- Everything New Apple Just Announced (Septembe
- Apple Watch Pre-Order
- Apple Research Kit launches with 5 Apps
- Apple TV now only $69
TAGS: gmail, iphone game
