Apps Weekly: Flight Control + Pastebot

One of the bigger successes of the App Store, this path-drawing game Flight Control is a pretty addicting casual game that doesn't require much of a brain to play.

However, for the price, it offers quite a few more features than you'd expect so you get your money's worth. You can choose between 4 different "Airfields" to beat your high scores on, and you can even host a game through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi so you and a friend can plot your planes and save your asses together. (I haven't tested the multiplayer for myself, but that's what the instructions imply)

But the game itself is pretty darn simple: using your finger, draw the paths the airplanes should go to. Simple enough, right?

Like any game striving to appeal to many audiences though, it gets progressively harder, and while I do not doubt for a minute that there are people who get bored when they reach the 100 plane mark, I have yet to do so, and the nearest I can get to that number is 56, so yes, the airfields get really crowded overtime.

You can direct three kinds of aircraft: a plain airplane, a helicopter and a, uhh... I don't know what the yellow plane's called. Before you direct them to their respective landing spots, the planes are color-coded so you won't have to worry about where the planes have to land, as the landing spots also have the same colors as the planes.

It's addicting, and it has a pretty cute stats screen that tells you about different sorts of trivial stuff, like the Average score you get on a game, or the most aircraft that appears on screen at the same time. So before you get people to look at those stats, you'll probably be compelled to improve your eye-hand coordination before you post them (as is with my case...). Also, you can make an account at http://flightcontrol.cloudcell.com so you can automatically link your scores to be published on Twitter, Facebook and even see Google Maps mashups of flight controller scores. While it's very much appreciated, the social community would be even better if it was actually incorporated in-game. What I mean by that is that you can register, access and follow people in the social community from within the app, ala OpenFeint or ngmoco's Plus+ network.

It's only a buck though, and it's pretty much worth it.

Rating: 8.5/10 [The original iPhone path-drawing game for a buck, iTunes Store Link]

Just announced is the release of a productivity app called Pastebot. This is Tapbot's third app which focuses on making copying and pasting on the iPhone an even better experience.

The intuitiveness of the iPhone's native copy and paste and the clipboard tracking capabilities of Pastebot make the two a lethal combination. But the thing I like best is that it actually comes in a very elegant package that's even sync-able to the Mac via Wi-Fi (although I'd like it better if it was also sync-able through Bluetooth and... yeah, Windows 7). So damn, that pretty much lets me copy and paste the cool stuff I find while on my iPod and then sync it later to my Mac... and by just tapping and holding too!

As a bonus, Tapbots has also incorporated some filters for text and pictures, which means that before you paste that picture in that e-mail, you can make it black and white first. What's great is that it lets you preview the results first before confirming.

It looks like a very powerful app that I might really use. It's just 2 dollars, and I'm gonna download it right... now.