Free Apps Roundup for January 23rd, 2009

This week brought a veritable cornucopia of great apps to the App Store. I saw more good quality apps released this past week than I’ve seen in quite a long time. Many of them are, oddly enough, tilt-based puzzle games, which are great for wasting time. Though, am I the only one, or is there just less time available to waste these days?

• Letters – If you’re anything like me, you love Scrabble. I’m not going to fully endorse this app, because it’s technically cheating, but it’s still pretty cool. While playing, you can type in your seven letters, and it does all of the thinking for you. Not as much fun as really playing, but hey, some people need a little help.
• HydroTitle: Lite – It’s like Super Monkey Ball only with water. You tilt the “board” to manouvre the water around the maze. You might even have to change states into gas or ice. This version has 5 of the full 30 levels.
• Tilt It Lite – Anything that combines two of my loves—anything with an Apple logo on it and The Price is Right—gets a thumbs up from me. This is like Pachinko, with different levels, for your iPhone. Drop your disk and you can influence it while it falls by tilting with full physics support. This version has 3 of the full 15 levels in Classic mode.
• AlienMangle Lite – Aliens, in the form of blue 1950s horror movie zombies, have invaded. You must protect a flock of robot sheep by killing the aliens in this first person shooter. Looks cool, but that’s some story line.
• Vibrating Massager – I’m doubting that the iPhone’s vibrate feature is enough to fix the knots in your neck, but you just never know. This basically just puts a picture on your iPhone of a massager (you have choices by the way) and turns on the vibrate features. That is all.
• Ustream Viewing Application – It’s not the full Ustream app that everyone is waiting for. You know, supposedly the first app for your iPhone that will be able to shoot video without being jailbroken? Yeah, well this isn’t it. But in the meantime, you can watch video streams with this, so almost half way there.
• Shift Lite – Here’s one of those block sliding puzzle games with a bit of a twist. You control all of the blocks at once by tilting your iDevice. These blocks all need to end up somewhere, and the puzzles just get harder over 30 free levels. The graphics actually look pretty nice, though maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by the power of the iPhone.