GameRating

This is the first handheld playable version of the GTA series. It is a universal app, meaning that is available on the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. First question anyone would ask, what do you do in it?

About a week ago I was trolling around looking for some sort of strategy game. During this I found two tittles; Army of Darkness, and Rise of Heroes. As I started to play, RoH started to look promising. After the strange story intro, you get plunged straight into the game. You and a band of merry men there to help you (and you will need help as you can’t personally damage the enemy castle) are on one side of a valley with a castle that you must protect whilst also pushing the enemy back to their castle on the other side of the valley.

Another game brought to us by our friends at Chillingo, and I have to say I am impressed. Normally I don’t really like arcade layouts on games but the retro style simply blew me away! The grunge effect was also a nice touch. The 3D graphics are really quite interesting to give a kind of “Nintendo 3DS” kind of feel but the graphics of the actual wrestling should see improvement.

Office Jerk is a free app on the iPhone/iPod Touch. The aim of the game is to hit the ‘Office Jerk’ as many times as possible, with things as small as a rubber or as large as a computer screen. You can buy packs which include dynamites and chocolate cupcakes to throw at the jerk, or you can find objects and touch them to obtain them in your inventory. There are different versions of the games, for example, Office Zombie which is for Halloween and there is a holiday edition. When it first came out, it had three stars on the Apple store, but now it has almost five. There has been over 7.5 million downloads of the game.

When most people hear about a game made from a movie (even on an iPhone) they immediately think disaster. But army of darkness by the infamous Backflip Studios is a semi-original side-scrolling shooter-tower defence bag of fun that’s been keeping me busy in my spare time for the past week.

Plants vs. Zombies (PvZ) - Not necessarily a phrase you hear all the time in the real world, but a winning combination in the gaming world. Zombies are becoming ever popular with the casual gamers (Zombie Taxi, Zombieville) and the hardcore gamers (CoD: Zombies, Left 4 Dead). PvZ definitely falls into the casual gamer category.

Paper toss is an app in which you throw paper (who would have thought it?) in a bin. This game is made by Backflip studios and is completely free - for anybody who wants a good flash game on the go this is perfect. This game also comes in different editions for people who can’t get enough out of this game.

As found by 9to5Mac, the developer seed of iOS 4.3 - the next software update for iOS devices - shows clearly that the iPad will have front and rear facing cameras.

The screenshot above, from 9to5Mac's website, shows that in one of the .plist files of the iOS operating system, a key value named "Back Facing 1MP Photo", showing that the camera on the back of the iPad is to be a 1 MegaPixel one. It was also found that the front-facing camera on the new iPad will be the same as the iPhone 4's FaceTime camera (VGA). That's right, you guessed it, FaceTime is coming to iPad!

Along with FaceTime, it has been discovered that "Photo Booth" is coming to iPad. Photo Booth is the same application on the Mac that lets you mess around with the webcam - add effects, different backgrounds etc.

With the recent release of iOS 4.3 to developers, I've noticed that, on the download page, "iPhone 3G" and "iPod Touch 2nd Generation" are not listed. This almost certainly means that Apple are phasing out software updates for iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2nd Generation.

Some of the new features in iOS 4.3 are:

As you may have heard, Apple are holding their latest special event, "Back to Mac", which has a focus solely on the Mac family. There's a lot of speculation about what's going to be announced, from a touch screen iMac, to an update on their world renowned operating system, Mac OS X. The fact is that some of these rumors will be true, but the majority false.

On the invitation to the event, there is an Apple logo, which is slightly turned to reveal a lion - the king of the "Mac OS Jungle", giving pretty solid evidence that the next release of OS X will be called "Lion".

Update: We've been told by Apple that there will be a live stream of the event at 6pm GMT (10am PDT).