Slime Pizza, Swift Playgrounds, and other awesome apps of the week
By Luke Dormehl • 10:00 am, January 28, 2018
'Appy weekend, everyone!
Image: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
A game in which you stick to surfaces in order to capture slices of pizza, while avoiding enemies? Yep, it's another oddball (but brilliant) iOS puzzle game.
That's just one of the picks we've highlighted for this week's "Awesome Apps" roundup. We've also got major upgrades of Logic Pro X and Apple's educational Swift Playgrounds, and a Friday the 13th title which really shouldn't work, but totally does. Check out our picks below.
Slime Pizza
I don't know about you, but a game called Slime Pizza pretty much instantly grabs my attention. Fortunately, this title more than delivers on the kind of wackiness that name promises. You play as a slime collecting, erm, slices of a pizza after your space ship crashes.
To be honest, though, that's really irrelevant since the memorable bit of Slime Pizza is its superb puzzle platforming action which involves an Angry Birds-style slingshotting game mechanic and plenty of obstacle and enemy avoidance. With a great retro aesthetic, Slime Pizza is one of the most fun and original titles I've played in ages.
Available for: iPhone, iPad
Cost: Free (with in-app purchases)
Get it from: App Store
Logic Pro, GarageBand's big brother, got a big update this week. You can read my colleague Charlie Sorrel's detailed post about it here, but — in short — it adds a lot of new effects plugins and a tremendous feature (that's really more than a feature) called Smart Tempo. This gets rid of the the click track, while still allowing you to create music that is much more organic, but still perfectly in time.
It basically works by extracting tempo data for parts recorded into Logic Pro, and then using this as the master track (it doesn't matter if it's guitar, piano, or drums). After this, any subsequent recorded parts can be made to conform to the human-generated master track. The result is brilliant, and perfectly implemented.
Tempo-tweaking can be a real nuisance, especially if you're not an expert. Smart Tempo manages to fix that in the way that's, well, pretty darn smart.
Available for: Mac
Cost: $199.99
Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle
Kill kill kill. Die die die.
Photo: Blue Wizard Digital
Last year's brilliant Slayaway Camp was enough to convince me that cartoony Minecraft-looking puzzle games based on 1980s slasher movies is a combination that works infinitely better than it has any right to.
Newly launched in the U.S. (unfortunately people in other territories will have to wait a while longer to play it), Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle takes the same premise, adds a couple of nifty features, and slaps on an official Jason Vorhees license.
I'll have an interview with the creators up next week, but if you enjoyed Slayaway Camp (or are simply intrigued by the aforementioned premise) this should totally be on your download list for the coming seven days.
Dive into coding with Swift Playgrounds.
Swift Playgrounds, for those unfamiliar with it, is Apple's code-learning app for kids. This week, it got its biggest update since debuting back in 2016.
Swift Playgrounds 2.0 lets users subscribe to playgrounds made by third-party creators, as well as browse and download their content, and get alerts when they make new playgrounds available. In addition, it now supports robots including IBM's TJBot and the Mekamon, and more.
Apple's kid-oriented educational app for its iOS coding language was already pretty essential. This app update just makes it even more so.
Available for: iPad
Posted in: News, Top stories Tagged: App Store, awesome apps, Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle, games, iOS, Logic Pro X, Mac, Swift Playgrounds