Tabata: A great exercise app for anyone looking to get in better shape

In today’s fast-paced world, many don’t have time to stay fit. In the struggle to find time to work out, many turn to fitness classes and gym memberships. This may be effective, but is expensive and you have to go to the gym to participate in these types of workouts. The Tabata app has a solution for anyone looking for a cheap, effective solution to fitness by offering an effective workout that takes less time to complete than brewing a cup of coffee.

Installation and Setup

The Tabata app can be downloaded for free in the Google Play Store. After downloading and opening the app, you are ready to go. There is no complex set-ups, logins, or installations. The app simply works.

App Use and Exercise

Before we get too far into this app review, let me explain what a Tabata is. Tabata is a type of HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) exercise routine. In a Tabata, exercises are grouped into twenty-second intervals of high-intensity exercises followed by ten seconds of rest. The cycle of exercise followed by rest is repeated eight times for a total workout lasting only four minutes.

To get a taste of what this app and workout style is about, I did two fourteen minute exercise sets a day. These sets consisted of three workouts, each followed by one minute of rest. After doing the exercises every day for two weeks, I feel like a new human. While I live a somewhat active lifestyle, these workouts quickly showed me how out of shape I was. After only two weeks of the workouts, I have more energy, I feel stronger, and friends have commented about my improved posture. I feel the urge to inform/warn everyone, these four-minute workouts will make a huge change in your life, but these short workouts are very difficult.

App Design

The design of this Tabata app is very simple and easy to use. The app comes with six preloaded workouts, all aimed at a different part of the body and all four minutes in length. Within each of the workouts, you can track your workout stats, set a schedule that will remind you to workout, and edit the exercises to maximize your repetitions.

In addition to allowing you to edit the preset Tabatas, the app allows you to create and name your own workouts. You can set the number of repetitions, the length of repetitions and breaks in between. The only thing you cannot do is add exercises. While that restriction is significant, the app still offers users a lot of control over their exercise routine.

Conclusion

Tabata is an easy to use app that anyone can pick up. The intense four-minute intervals in the Tabata workout provide workouts that can be done at any time during the day while the variety of preloaded workouts allows users to strengthen and tone all parts of the body. The Tabata app also offers users a lot of control when designing workouts, while the apps scheduling capabilities and statistics keep track of your progress and make sure you don’t miss a day. I would strongly suggest this app to all looking for a little help getting in shape, but be ready for the hardest four minutes of your life.

Inspirational Daily Quotes: Exactly what the name implies (app review)

• Dev: Spartan Developer
• App Link: Inspirational Daily Quotes
• Installs: 10,000-50,000
• Price: Free w/Ad Support

Info

Today we will be taking a look at an app that is crazy simple. Do you ever need inspiration? What gets you inspired? The Bible, A speech from Martin Luther King Jr., Proverbs from around the world? If so, then you need to check out Inspirational Daily Quotes in the Google Play Store. This app has over 1200 inspirational quotes from all over history, From Jesus to Edgar Allen Poe to Conrad Hilton, this app is full of inspiration.

How it works

Now let’s dive into how it works. The first thing that I noticed is that the app did not request any permissions. This is great, as we will see once we get into the app there is really nothing that it would need to access. I am always leery of simple one-trick apps that are asking for location, read SMS, access phone or other odd permissions. I always deny these request until I can confirm that it is really needed for the app to function.

Next, you will see a quote. This is the meat and potatoes of this app. Let’s move to the top of the app for now, though. At the top right there are two buttons. The first is the share button, this will allow you to share the quote that is currently on the screen, via practically any app that allows that sort of thing. So whether you want to text you mom or share this quote with Facebook or Instagram you can do it. To the right of that is the three dot button that indicates settings. Once clicked the app keeps the simple theme going by displaying only four options, Notification settings, Copy quote, Rate app and More apps.

Inside the notification settings, there are two options, time and show daily. The picture to the right shows what those do. The other three options, Copy Quote, Rate App and More Apps are self-explanatory and do exactly what you think they would do.

Let’s move to the bottom of the app. Just above the two buttons at the bottom, you see an ad banner. I don’t think this gets in the way and I much prefer this type of ad over a big full-pager that I have to close, which by the way, you will see when you click the all quotes button. Under that banner are the Show all Quotes and Random Quote buttons, I’ll let you take a guess at what these do. The last thing that happens takes place outside of the app in the notification shade. When you see the lightbulb in the notification tray, pull it down to see the new quote that is waiting for you. You can also click the notification and it will take you to the full app. That’s all she wrote on this simple little app to keep you inspired.

No app is perfect

I do have a few small things that bug me about this app. The First is I seem to get notified more that once a day at 7:05am like I set the notifications to. I’m not sure why this is happening. Two, when scrolling through the quotes by clicking the random quote button I saw a lot of duplication, with 1200 quote in the library I should be able to click for an hour and not see the same one twice. And the third thing is when clicking on the all quotes button they are too far apart and it takes a lot of scrolling to get to a few quotes in this mode. Number 4 is the full page ad that I have to close to see all the quotes. I dislike these types of ads and think app developers should do away with them.

Adventures of J: An “Escape the Room” style game that needs some serious polish

Escape the Room games were a hugely popular genre of puzzle games back in the day when Flash games were all the rage on computers. Your goal was to find clues and items scattered around the area that allowed you to solve puzzles to ultimately escape from a room or collect a treasure of some sort.

There are still several popular games in this genre available on mobile devices (The Room, 100 Doors) and several developers that are devoted to still making some great escape puzzles. Unfortunately, an Android game we’re reviewing, Adventures of J, is overloaded by ads and is plagued by some serious issues that prevent it from being a great game.

• Developer: Hidden Fun Games
• Price: Free, $.99 IAP to remove ads
• Download: Google Play

Adventures of J is a story that starts off with a boy trying to rescue his kidnapped dog, which then turns into preventing a bank heist, a treasure hunt, and many other adventures across the 12 chapters of the game. You’ll find yourself exploring every nook and cranny of the game world to figure out how to advance through the many puzzles in this surprisingly long game.

The Setup

To start off, in order to play Adventures of J, there is a mandatory install of Adobe AIR from the Play Store. After the installation of AIR, you relaunch the app to be greeted by a loading screen, followed by a second loading screen specifically for an unskippable, full-screen ad.

Once you’re in the game, it starts out with a painfully choppy cut scene. I’m running this game on a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, so there isn’t any reason why it should stutter as much as it does aside from a serious lack of optimization from the developer.

The cut scenes themselves are riddled with many grammatical errors. The animation is stiff and dated, showing just how far we’ve come since the days of heavy reliance on Flash. Characters have awkward movements, gliding across the floor on legs that are perpetually straight and move at various speeds. There is a plot, but it doesn’t matter heavily to the playing of the game, which is good because it’s fairly nonsensical.

The Gameplay

The gameplay is what you would expect from a game of this style. You navigate to different screens tapping on objects that will either display some part of a code that needs to be entered somewhere, or that will give you an item, such as keys or wrenches, that allow you to open desk drawers, chests, and doors to more rooms.

One of the better puzzles in Adventures of J

As for the puzzles themselves, most of them are pretty straight forward. You might find a playing card that has four different colored circles arranged on the back, and somewhere nearby you’ll find a computer screen with four colored circles that you’ll have to arrange to match the card.

Most of the puzzles are this easy, but there are a few that had me scratching my head, particularly the more elaborate sliding puzzles, where you’re given a grid full of images and you have to slide them one-by-one into place, being careful to not mess up other parts of the puzzle.

The Rough Spots

The most difficult parts of Adventures of J are the lack of saving progress and the advertisements. J has 12 chapters and allows you to start at the beginning of each chapter, but every chapter is between 30-45 minutes long. This could be remedy easily with a few checkpoints throughout each chapter or a quick save feature, but as it stands now, even if you were just minutes from the end of a chapter, you’ll have to start at the beginning of it if you don’t finish. It happened to me once or twice and is very frustrating.

To add insult to injury, there is an ad banner that runs at the top of the screen constantly and every 5-10 minutes there is a full-screen ad that pops up, forcing you to pause the action for a minute to sit through a video.

There is a walkthrough button conveniently placed at the bottom left of the screen at all times which leads you to a website that has a video walkthrough. On this page are links to other games from the developer and a few ads, but the kicker is there is a 10-second timer that counts down before the walkthrough video is displayed.

Between this, and the constant ads running on the top of the app at all times, and the full-screen unskippable ads that run every few minutes, it becomes quite clear this app is mainly just a money grab disguised as a mediocre game with dated visuals and gameplay.

Conclusion

If you are a die hard escape game fan, then maybe you will get some entertainment out of this. With 12 chapters each about 30 minutes long, you’ve got a lot of content, but with easy to solve puzzles and a sea of constant ads, Adventures of J is more annoying that it is fun. If you’re looking for a fun puzzle game, you should look elsewhere.

Star Knight: A welcome change from the typical Play Store platformers (review)

Sometimes I feel like the Play Store will never evolve from providing these short, simple games that offer very basic gameplay, no progression, no story and almost null replay value. But then I encounter games as Star Knight and my hopes return.

If more games were like Star Knight and less like these short attention span kind of games, then the world would be a better place. Seriously, Star Knight provides gameplay and progression like very few games in the Play Store, and manages to keep you coming back for more with elements such as unlockables and intricate level design.

Developer: LeftRight
Price: $0.99

Setup

A very curious (and I might say unfortunate) thing happens when opening the app: it asks you for a total of six permissions. I mean, it’s hard (though possible) to develop apps that don’t require permissions. The problem is, why does Star Knight asks me for permission to access my contacts and my location? There’s absolutely no functions in the game that might require this. Draw your own conclusions.

After this sketchy episode, you’re greeted with a Google Play Games setup, as is the case with an increasing number of games in the Play Store. Star Knight uses it as a platform for setting up achievements, save files, and similar. If you play games regularly, you know the drill by now: select a Google account and our Android overlords will do the rest.

Overview

Gameplay is really fun and provides new elements all the time.

The game starts with a couple of lines of story and then kicks you right into the game. Your character starts the journey alongside his significant other. However, the boss at the end of the level deals with this quickly (and sadly for the main character).

You have four on-screen buttons at first: left, right, jump, and attack. Since a couple of taps and a little bit of curiosity is enough to figure out the controls, there’s no tutorial or anything similar. The game is simple: kill your enemies, avoid the multiple obstacles, reach the end of the level, rinse and repeat.

There are five different worlds, each one divided into 12 different levels. The levels start simple enough, with normal platforms and enemies to kill. However, you will quickly see that Star Knight will start throwing at you walls with spikes, rotating objects with spikes, grounds with spikes and other spiky paraphernalia that will halt your progress. Apart from spikes, puzzles get more complicated and enemies get stronger as you advance in the game.

Fortunately, you can get stronger, too. Your journey will take you into different situations where you will find objects from your significant other. This will increase your total health bar.

Also, you can get runes, which are white, hexagonal elements that you have to collect in order to get skills. These skills vary between them, from Super Smash, which does a strong attack, to Shield, which creates a shield around your character for four seconds. Some skills cannot be obtained from runes, though.

This is where the concept of coins becomes important. When you kill enemies, you will get coins. They are used to buy additional swords for your character and skills that are not unlockable by runes. If you lack the required coins and you need that shiny new sword right now, then you can buy coins through in-app purchases.

General Impressions

Level design in Star Knight is outstanding.

Of course, none of these elements would be useful if the gameplay was boring. Fortunately, it’s not. Star Knight combines different elements in a very imaginative, fun way. For example, there are walls that you can climb (Super Mario-like), crates that you can pile up to make you reach the unreachable, springs in the ground, switches to unblock/block certain areas, platforms that crumble and regenerate after time, bombs, among others. This provides gameplay that varies all the time and never gets boring.

All of these collectibles, progress elements, and hike in difficulty makes the game very fun and keep you coming back to see which kind of obstacles the game will throw at you next. Also, the fact that you can collect stuff adds to the replay value. You can actually experience that feeling of progression that is so hard to find in the Play Store these days.

Controls also feel very responsive. You never get the impression of being hindered by them. I would love to see a vibration setting, though. I just can’t get used to tapping buttons on a game without receiving any kind of tangible feedback. That’s not a problem with the game, however. The controls are awesome, their placement is adequate and their responsiveness is outstanding.

Arena

There’s an additional mode called Arena, in which your character is dropped in a monster-filled stage and you have to kill tiers of monsters in order to advance. It’s a really fun way of distracting from the main gameplay, and it’s also the most efficient way of getting gold for those prohibitively expensive swords available.

The arena provides a nice challenge and is a great addition to the main story.

Be warned though: either I’m really bad at this game, or the arena is a pretty hard endeavor. It could be both, too. Anyways, be ready for the taste of frustration, especially at the beginning when you have a weak sword that can’t even cut through butter.

Graphics

The artwork for this game is primarily black. Depending on the setting, the color palette may change a bit. Normally, though, these colors tend to be dark, so don’t expect colorful, flashy graphics. This isn’t meant in a bad way, however: the game is really nice to look at, and the artwork is very consistent across different elements, making the game feel cohesive.

Also, apart from the main character, which has very subtle but nice elements, the other sprites are normally only mildly detailed. Again, this is not supposed to be a bad thing, it’s just so you can adjust your expectations. Monsters and other elements look good with the elements that the designers have decided to incorporate. The backgrounds always look nice, and the combination of colors make up for some interesting sights. Just don’t expect highly detailed sprites and you’ll be fine.

Sound

You can get stronger by buying new swords.

The songs that play in the background during gameplay are soothing melodies that don’t get old fast (or at least it takes a lot of time for you to get tired of it). A good thing about them is that they change according to the place you’re at. Each world has its own track, as well as the arena and the main menu.

Sound effects accomplish their objectives without being spectacular. Several actions trigger a sound effect, such as swinging your sword, slashing other enemies, and dying. They’re nothing special but they get the job done.

Options

There aren’t many options you can change, but the ones that are present are enough. You can turn on or off both the background music and the special effects. There’s also a way of changing the language of the interface (16 languages available), which is nice, and something games fail to do most of the time.

Another noteworthy option doesn’t appear in the options screen, but in the pause screen: the ability to record your gameplay. If you want to upload your prowess to YouTube, you can record it with this option. It’s nice that the developer took the time to implement these kind of stuff that other games don’t provide.

Google Play Games

There are not many options to choose from, but Google Play Games is integrated.

There are 18 different achievements to keep you entertained. They range from moderately easy (Kill Act 1 boss), to insanely hard (get three stars on all levels). There are some that deal with the memories of your beloved one, watching the ending, and even with dying (do it 1000 times and you’ll get an achievement).

The game is supposed to let you upload your save file to the cloud, to be retrieved later on another device. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work, no matter how hard I tried under different conditions. When I tried to upload a save file, a progress dialog appeared and then disappeared right after. It’s unfortunate, since it would be a big plus if the featured worked correctly. Maybe it’s a problem with my phone and not with the functionality itself, but I’m not certain.

Conclusion

Star Knight manages to provide fun for hours, thanks to its intricate level design, and sense of progression. You can definitely feel how this game is much more refined and elaborate than the majority of games available in the Play Store. Yes, a lot of the games in the store are normally free, and, for many different reasons, a paid app is a barrier to a lot of people. But, if you normally spend your money on apps, then for a mere $0.99 (€0.92 in Europe) you can get a highly polished game that will bring you joy and fun for a long time.

Download Star Knight from the Google Play Store.

Mr. Jump makes the leap to Android (review)

Overview

Mr. Jump was a widely popular game on iOS, and it’s finally made its way over to Android. Mr. jump is a simple game with a charming aesthetic and challenging platforming that will surely keep you coming back.

• Developer: 1Button & ZPLAY
• Cost: Free

Impressions

Mr. Jump is one of those games that you hear about a lot as an Android user, not privy to those iOS exclusives. It’s a simple, challenging, and addictive platformer that everyone loves and is given heaps of praise. After what seems like all too long, Mr. Jump is finally here on Android, ported over by ZPLAY.

Mr. Jump is a cute, simplistic platformer with one-button controls and a basic premise of getting to then end without dying to advance and unlock the next stage. The game is challenging and does a generally decent job of scaling the difficulty throughout its many levels.

The trick in Mr. Jump is timing and quick thinking, and it can get very difficult in later stages to execute perfectly every time. There are different power-ups in the game as well, to help you navigate the many obstacles, which include jetpacks and infinite jumps. There are also secret areas that allow you to bypass levels and unlock even more.

1 of 7

The secret to Mr. Jump’s success is rooted in simplicity. The graphics are blocky, and feature bright colors and patterns pleasing to the eye. The sounds and music are fun and jaunty without getting distracting, and overall the game looks and feels great without being overly cutesy or too bland.

The developers have really done a good job of making this game play well as well and look good, and it’s evident by the success it has achieved on iOS. Mr. Jump on Android runs well, with no performance issues that I’ve experienced so far. Overall, Mr. Jump is just a very solid game to play.

That being said, I do have an issue with the difficulty scaling in some places. For the most part the game is a decent challenge, but in some levels, including the first one, the game seems unusually hard and I miss jumps that I seem to have timed correctly.

I don’t know if it’s just me or if the game is actually that difficult in places, but sometimes Mr. Jump can get frustrating and make you want to throw your phone in anger. Despite that, I still enjoy Mr. Jump and that challenge certainly encourages you to keep trying, until you finally beat that one level that has been plaguing you for days or weeks.

Conclusion

Mr. Jump is, in my opinion, a perfect example of a mobile game. It’s simple, yet challenging – engaging, yet not overbearing. Most of all, it’s fun and addicting without being a time-consuming mess.

It’s cute and has polish and substance, and just the right amount of infuriating challenge that will bring people back to playing again and again. Mr. Jump checks all the boxes for a great, fun game and I am sure it will find similar success on Android that it has on iOS.