Review: Halloween Special Edition (3 apps)

[cjvitek]

With the upcoming holiday, I thought I would review three of the higher rated halloween apps. I choose to review Pumpkin, Halloween Experience, and Halloween.

Crazy Pumpkin (first two attached pictures):

Pumpkin is a simply pumpkin face app. It works on the same premise as the old flip books, where you could change three parts of the picture (eyes, nose, and mouth) to form new faces. Except this does it with a pumpkin theme, so you face looks like it was carved on a pumpkim.

When you shake the iPhone, the background color sounds and a "scary noise" will also eminate from the phone.

There are numerous combinations possible, and you flip through the various options simply by swiping the screen. My daughter loves this app, and would probably play it for hours upon end if given the choice.

That's it - very simple, straighforward, and doesn't try to do anything else.

Pros: Entertaining combination of faces are possible, simply interface and controls
Cons: Nothing really, although some of the faces don't really seem to much like a pumpkin carving.

All in all, this is an okay app, and the price is right (free) for some quick entertainment for the young ones. 4 out of 5 stars.

Halloween Experience (second two attached pictures):

This application is sort of a catch all application, featuring three "games" for halloween. The first is a pumpkin "carving" games, where you can drag different shapes to create you pumpkin. This is a pretty nice feature, although I found the controls a little difficult and unresponsive. You can resize the facial features to make a unique pumpkin. Unfortunately, there isn't a save feature. In addition, some of the "shape" seem odd when you think about putting them on your pumpkin (a dog bone???). You can turn the lights out to see what your pumpkin looks like when glowing at night, too.

The second feature is a halloween themed hangman...er....hang-skeleton game. It is straightforward and okay, although the word seem pretty easy to figure out.

The third feature is oddly out of place - a tower of Hanoi style game, with an ever increasing number of disks (no picture included). While the color pattern is made for halloween, it seems odd to include it in this set of games.

The last thing I want to mention is a built in feature. You are supposed to be able to tilt the iPhone in one of eight directions to get 8 different sounds. I tried it, but it didn't seem to work correctly. You can adjust the sensitivity (which I didn't do) so perhaps that might have been the problem.

Pros: A nice feature set for halloween.
Cons: Some of the controls seem unresponsive, one game (tower of Hanoi) seems out of place.

All in all, for the price ($.99) this is a pretty good app, and give you more than similarly priced applications. If you are looking for a multifunction halloween program with some basic pumpkin "carving", this is probably your applicaiton. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Halloween (last picture)

This is a basic, "sounds of halloween" program. It has a very nice interface (one thing I look for in polished iPhone apps), and a pretty standard sound selection (scream, creaky door, howl, etc). Beware though, the description seems to imply that is has many unlisted sounds. It describes 8 of them, and then say "and more!". The and more is the one other sound button that appears on the screen. I was expecting "and more" to mean potentially another whole page of sounds...sigh, gullible me.

The sounds are good, and you can hit multiple buttons at once. I wish you could program in a sequence of sounds, but that is probably more extensive than the creators wanted.

Pros: Nice interface, straighforward design.
Cons: Limited selection of sounds compared to other apps

All in all, for $.99, if you primary concern is visual appearance, go with this app. If you want a larger selection of sounds, I would choose one of the others (although I can't comment on the sound quality of the others). Because of the misleading description and the fact you only get 9 sounds, I am giving this only 2.5 out of 5 stars.

I only reviewed these three apps, and there are easily dozens mores, but I couldn't see spending much money for a niche app like these, for a holiday that will be over in a couple of weeks.