Is there any life left in the zombie genre? Get it? I made a funny. Comedy hijinks aside, I’m serious. I think I’m getting zombied-out. My threshold may have been reached when authors began re-writing classic literature with zombies as the main characters. Where the hell do you go from there? Apparently, I am somewhat alone in my burgeoning dislike of all things zombies as there is a veritable avalanche of undead media looming on the horizon, from more “classic” books, more comics and graphic novels, a new series on AMC, more movies and more games. Riding this cultural wave to great effect is Monster Mayhem, a new iPhone/iPad game distributed by Chillingo that manages to transcend its zombie aesthetic and deliver a game that is more fun than may be readily apparent at first glance.

Monster Mayem is a hybrid of sorts, a mix between Tower Defense and Operation Wolf. Unlike typical tower defense games, Monster Mayhem doesn’t task you with placing weapons on the screen. Instead, YOU the weapon. The initial stages find you with nothing more than a butcher knife as creatures of the underworld begin their slow waltz across the screen towards their objective, the cemetery gates. Using your finger, you simply swipe across the creatures until you have inflicted enough damage. This act becomes increasingly more difficult as more and varied creatures beginning heading for the gate. Before you know it, you’re swiping your finger against a horde of undead.

Monster Mayhem ramps up the difficulty at a good pace, easing you in slowly but not wasting time in pumping up the action. Within a few rounds you’ll start gaining access to new weapons, from pistols to shotguns, from UZIs to grenades. Every weapon has a limited number of ammo so you have to be careful where and how you use your weapon, ensuring it is effective against the creature in your cross-hairs. As the game progresses and nastier monsters make themselves known, you’ll soon discover that certain weapons are ineffective while others are superior against specific monsters. This constant juggling between weapons for maximum effect is the heart of the game and the constant, rapid interaction required by the player is the heart of Monster Mayhem’s addictiveness.

Monster Mayhem benefits from a great art style, reminiscent of Plants Vs. Zombies, as well as great and varied sound-effects. Levels mature at a good rate (even including obstacles you have to shoot around) and players can even spend money dropped from monsters on weapon upgrades and ammo, adding a new layer of customization.  There are even a few non-standard modes on offer, including Boss Rush and Endless, which enhances the playability considerably.

I expected to be mildly uninterested in this game, based on my own preconceptions and weariness of all things zombies, but Monster Mayhem was able to penetrate my bias and find me playing into the wee hours of the night when I should have been playing the Halo Reach beta. Is their higher praise than that?

Monster Mayhem is $1.99 on iTunes (and looks great on the iPad, though it isn’t native)

Final Rating 5/5

Air Sharing HD for the Apple iPad has made a measurable improvement in my life, single-handedly solving a vexing dilemma that all iPad owners face: how to easily move files between PC/MAC and iPad without bothering with iTunes. Simple things like downloading an email attachment on the iPad and viewing that file on the PC without jumping through hoops is Air Sharing’s strong point, but it has so many other essential features that it rises to the level of Essential App, a utility everyone should own.

Some may think Air Sharing HD is a little on the pricey side at $9.99, but I’ve come to the conclusion the app fully justifies the price-tag. This is a well-designed, streamlined, and straight-forward application, well worth the price of admissions for those folks who need fast and reliable access to cross-platform files. Air Sharing HD has some great, additional features like creating a wireless hard disk, the ability to view a wide-range of documents, built-in emailing, mounting remote file servers, downloading email attachments and, perhaps best of all, printing documents, though this is only works for MACs at the present time, a fact that should be made more clear to potential customers.

It only takes a minute to create a virtual network with Air Sharing HD and this network can be easily accessed from any browser on your PC or MAC. Once connected, all you do is drag-and-drop files for easy transference and bim-bam, stuff gets done. Hell, this app will even allow you to host a web server using WebDAV. Other supported server types you can create include Mail Server, SSH, FTP, FTPS, MobileMe iDisk, Public Disk, icloud, icloud Super Drive, FilesAnywhere and MyDisk.se. A pretty powerful and accurate PDF reader is available that supports tables of contents, thumbnails and search, can throw up large images at a good speed and even lets you listen to your local music via a playlist interface.

None of these cool features would mean a damn thing if file support sucks wind, which fortunately is not the case, as Air Sharing HD will manhandle anything from iWork, Microsoft Office, HTML, PDF, Adobe Illustrator, RTF, text with character encodings, movies, sounds and images. I threw a ton of files at and it handled everything with great speed and accuracy.

An app like Air Sharing HD could have easily succumbed to horrible design and an overly complex setup, but the opposite holds true here. You’ll even find a great, built-in manual that is well-presented and informative, taking you through every process step-by-step, something I wish more developers included.

So, do you need Air Sharing HD? The answer really depends on your computer activities. I can see everyone benefiting, no matter their level of need, as Air Sharing HD is just one of those utilities you WILL use at one point or another. For myself, I’m constantly dealing with tons of files on a daily basis, whether I’m moving screenshots from my iPad to PC or moving documents I started to write on the iPad but want to finish on my desktop. Prior to Air Sharing HD, I was stuck emailing myself files just so I could have access on my PC. Air-Sharing HD has resolved that issue and made my life much easier, which is what this app is all about. Highly recommended.

Final Rating: 5/5

Air Sharing HD for Apple iPad ($9.99, iTunes Link)

Space Station Frontier HD is a top-shelf game from Origin8, one that easily justifies the iPad as a viable gaming platform. It’s obvious the designers took great care to deliver a solid package, especially when a straight port of the iPhone version could have been a simple alternative. Instead, Origin8 has overhauled the game specifically for iPad users, taking great advantage of the larger screen and increased processing power to create one of the best real-time strategy games currently available on any mobile platform, and I include the PSP and Nintendo DS in that list (where you’d pay three times as much for a lesser game).

Space Station Frontier HD doesn’t reinvent the wheel with its gameplay, but it does manage to blend different genres into a unified whole, specifically real-time strategy mixed with a heaping of tower defense. However, unlike most tower defense games, Space Station Frontier doesn’t feel repetitive as there are enough random elements that make each session play differently than the last.

You assume the role of a space station commander, tasked with amassing resources from nearby asteroids, a job description made difficult by frequent alien incursions. Mining is more involved than simply sending a ship towards an awaiting resource, as you must build the infrastructure of your facility to best maximize your output. This involves coordinating the placement of Power Nodes that must extend from your main station, nodes that offer juice to your Miner nodes that will extract resources as long as they have power and are not being attacked. In this way, Space Station Frontier is a constant balancing act between spending resources on new defenses and enhancements while protecting your station and attached infrastructures. How well you strategically place defenses and assorted nodes can mean the difference between success and failure.

Space Station Frontier HD is generous in its options, featuring a 15 mission campaign setting as well as Survival Mode, Mining Mode and Protect, each of which offers endless fun long after you’ve completed the campaign. Space Station Frontier even uses the Open Feint system, so you can match your scores with a global leaderboard to better gauge your suckage and even unlock achievements Xbox-style.

Space Station Frontier HD ramps up the game difficulty at a great pace. During the initial stages, it does an excellent job introducing you to the basic concepts, but it doesn’t take long before matters get far more intense. Suddenly, you are no longer facing swarms of little alien fighters but armadas of battleships. In these later stages you have access to a wide-variety of base-building options, including power generators, power storage, repair stations, laser turrets, inteceptor turrets, rail cannons and missile launchers.

None of this would anything if the graphics suck. Fortunately, that is not the case. Quite the opposite, in fact. Space Station Frontier HD is one of the better-looking games I’ve seen on the iPad, offering a rich palette of colors, detailed units, great explosions and unique design aesthetics. Accompanying the great graphics is a beautiful interface that is fast to respond, easy to use, and takes full advantage of the iPad, even working flawlessly in landscape or portrait mode, depending upon your preference. One thing I really love and appreciate is that you can access your iTunes music while playing the game, a simple enough feature that isn’t implemented by enough designers.

At the end of the day, Space Station Frontier HD can hold its head high, proud that it has delivered a high-level of gameplay and polish. This isn’t a game that was crapped out over a weekend of development, like so many other iPhone/iPad games and fully justifies its $4.99 price-tag. If there was one thing I’d really like to see it would have to be multiplayer, but Origin8 is already working on a multiplayer upgrade that should be coming soon, an addition that will Space Station Frontier HD one of the best games available for the Apple iPad.

Final Rating: 5/5

Space Station Frontier HD $4.99 (iTunes Link)

I have zero musical skill, unless you count tapping plastic buttons on my Rock Band Stratocaster, which I don’t. I suspect I am not alone. Yet, despite my inability to create music with an instrument, I have a deep love of listening to music. This passion has, over the years, found me exploring various software programs in the hopes of uncovering some shred of dormant ability. I’ve tried just about every program, from the light and fluffy DJ MIX to the hardcore Propellerhead applications and a little of everything in between. I had varying degrees of success, enough to inform me that I have an ear for music but not much else.

Then, Looptastic HD for iPad entered my life. The clouds parted. Rainbows danced. Kids frolicked with passive tigers. Finally, here was a piece of software that spoke my language by not speaking a language. It presents itself as a simple interface, begging for tactile interaction. You start moving sliders around and within seconds you’re making music, ready to put a “DJ” in front of your name.

Simple, Yet Deep

I can’t review Looptastic HD from the perspective of a professional. I can’t fully appreciate what a pro’s needs may or may not be with a musical application of this sort, so I’m not even going to bother. I assume since Keyboard magazine is impressed, that should be good enough for the experts. Instead, I can only discuss Looptastic HD from the perspective of a frustrated, yet eternally curious lover of electronic music who wishes he could create tunes. From that angle, Looptastic HD is a complete success.

I’ve been around for over 40 years now, which means I grew up when Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream were pretty much the only options one had when listening to electronic music. I remember getting the Computer World album by Kraftwerk when it was first released in 1981 and listening to it over and over and over like a mental patient. Now, all these years later, the power to create rich and textured music is now, literally, in the palm of my hands.

When you first begin a session of Looptastic HD, you are presented with a list of available Loops Sets. You can download a ton more, for free, by simply clicking on the embedded Loop Store, wherein new loops are downloaded seamlessly. By the time I had downloaded everything possible, I had 92 different loops sets with each set holding 6 or more samples. All of the loop sets are labeled with its appropriate genre, including Ambient, Breakbeat, Breaks, Drum & Bass, Dubs, Hip Hop, Minimal, Prog, Reggae and Trance.

Clicking on a set of loops from the initial screen brings you to the main interface. Samples are automatically loaded and ready to be manipulated. All of the available loop sets remain visible and selectable at anytime, meaning you can easily combine loop sets, no matter the style, without limitation, on-the-fly and in real-time. So, if you want the drum loop from a particular Trance set and a vocal track from a Reggae set, there is nothing to stop you.

Swiping a sample up to the editor places it in position. How high you place the sample determines its relative volume. You can stick samples in one of three locations, including the right-channel, left-channel, and middle channel. This allows you to use the left-right fader to easily mask sounds on either the right or left side, while the middle channel remains unaffected.

An effects panel allows for real-time integration and includes the following: Low Pass Filter, High Pass Filter, Band Pass Filter, Notch Filter, Gate, Bitcrusher, Flanger, Glitchy Repeater and Delay.

Looptastic HD allows you to save your custom loop sets for later use, as well as record your masterpiece for export to PC or MAC as a 16-bit stereo AIFF file. If the mammoth selection of available loops isn’t enough to satiate your hunger, then you’ll be pleased to know Looptastic HD allows for the importing of custom loops via all applications that support Sonoma Wireworks AudioPaste.

Looptastic HD is a Killer App

From my layman’s perspective, Looptastic HD seems to have all the bases covered, catering to both hardcore musicians/DJs and casual geeks like myself. It has a truly wonderful interface that makes full use of the iPad’s capabilities. Sound quality is excellent, especially when running the audio through a home theater system. Sound Trend is more than generous in its offering of hundreds of free loops, and their continued commitment to the product in the form of future updates is solid.

I’ve tried tons of these programs over the years and Looptastic HD is easily the best I’ve seen. It’s a complete steal at $9.99, especially if you take a gander at the prices of equivalent software resting in the aisles of Best Buy.  Best of all, no matter your skill level, there is something here for everyone.

Final Score: 5/5

Looptastic HD for iPad ($9.99)