Today it’s Thursday and it’s time for our weekly free app reviews. Each Thursday, AppleLunch will provide you with reviews of free apps from the App Store to separate the wheat from the chaff. Today, we will show you how to lose a fortune in just few seconds, and we will show you how you can cheat in your geography tests.
Blackjack Free
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his application is one of the first Apps I got from the iTunes App Store and still it’s on my 8GB iPhone which I carry around wherever I go – of course. So yes, it’s an old application and an even older game. I have no idea on how old blackjack is and I think that everyone knows how to play either Blackjack or 21, which are apretty much the same.
Still, I will summarize the basic rules so that we are all clear about it. You place a bet before you get two cards dealt, and the objective is to get 21 by adding up the cards on your hand. If you are bellow, you can either ask for another card in hope of hitting 21, or you can stand on your current hand. If you ask for another hand and the value of your hand exceeds 21, you have lost. If you decide to stand before you cross 21, the dealer shows two open cards and do the same as if he is a player.
The winner holds a hand with a value of, or nearest to, 21 without exceeding it. If you win you get the pot and the dealer always place the same bet as you. If you gets a hand with the value of 21 on the first two cards (an ace plus a ten or court card) it’s called “Blackjack” and the dealer pays you back 1.5 times.
Now the rules are all clear, let’s go to the application. When I first got the game, it was without any advertisements in the top of the screen, but today almost every free applications has one kind of advertisement, the one more annoying than the other. I try to ignore the ads, but when the game decides to shuffle the deck, a full screen advertisement appears and want to know who I am, so that they can advertise products directly to me. When this has happened two times, the advertisement company knows my sex and how old I am. The third full screen advertisement I saw, was an album by Moby! Well, I have to live with it and I’m good at ignoring advertisements anyway, but including advertisements in games like they do it in Blackjack Free, makes it a little less offering to play.
That sounds like a good advice
The game though, is well made. The background is, of course, a real blackjack table with realistic text. If you are insecure whether you shall hit or stand, you can push the red “advice” button on the left, and then the dealer tells you what he would do, if he was in your seat.
The advice function can be turned off by pressing the i-button in the upper right corner, which directs you to the option menu. Here you can also read the blackjack rules, decide how many decks you will play with, active surrender and insurance functions and tour the sound on or off. You can also hit the “statistic” button to see statistics of your play.
Blackjack Free is, in spite of the annoying full screen advertisements, a full functioning single player blackjack game. It meets the requirements of a free board game, and it’s really realistic. In fact, you can practice to sharpen your skills in the art of counting cards with this application, without loosing any money at all. The negative sides of the game shines through though and it’s only collecting 4 stars.
Get the app from iTunes App Store
4/5 STARS
WorldWiki
The second review today is of WorldWiki. WorldWiki isn’t a game like Blackjack is, but more a database of information.
When you start WorldWiki it shows a loading screen and after just a second it takes you to the start screen of the app. Here you can see a list of every single country in the world, and if you press one of the countries, you will get to a page with information on the certain country that you have selected.
On the country page you can see a lot of useful information e.g. the capital, the official language, the currency, the population and of course the flag.
You can also use the application in horizontal view so you can spot tiny countries like Denmark
If you press the button in the upper right corner, the application takes you to a new page. Here you can see the flag in full screen mode and if you press the button called “National Anthem,” the application actually plays an instrumental version of the national anthem from the selected country for you. This requires though, that you are connected to the internet, either by WiFi or 3G.
Playing the Danish national anthem called "Der er et yndigt land" with the Danish flag in the background
Though it isn’t an application that you’ll probably use every day and spend many hours of using, it is good to have. You’ll never know when you need some basic information on a country, such as the population density in Northern Mariana Island, or more popular: What side of the road they drives on in Denmark.
The app is of course free, since this is a free app review, but if you like it, you can buy an extended version which includes a World Factbook. This free application though, is without any kinds of annoying advertisements and it reach the standards of a free app, though it doesn’t impress.
Get the app from iTunes App Store
4/5 STARS
. If you want to transfer a file from your Windows partition to your Mac OS X partition, all you have to do, is to open the drive called ‘Bootcamp’ and now you can look for the file you want to your Mac OS X partition.
This is the fifth part of our review of Snow Leopard, or if you want, you can call it a guided tour. Today we will continue our journey through the new operating system from Apple, called Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and we will look into some of the smaller features which Apple has provided us with, and god we are still grateful.
