In today’s Download Discounts, play a classic first-person shooter for free, increase your sensory awareness, and use your iPhone as a drum kit.
Duke Nukem 3D SE (iPhone) Free (was $1.99)
One of the most beloved franchises in all of first-person shooter video gaming is free on the iPhone. Run, don’t walk, to snag this one!
If you need a little more convincing, consider that Duke Nukem is considered one of the coolest alien-fighting heroes ever. The game is definitely for mature audiences, as it is traditionally filled with bloody alien deaths, strippers and steroid use. But Duke Nukem also kicks ass, as he so often proclaims, and the game has that great, old, PC style from the early 1990s that’s a lot of fun to re-experience.
Awareness! The Headphone App (iPhone) $2.99 (was $4.99)
Lots of people like to throw on a pair of headphones while walking down the street, but that can present a problem — with limited sensory awareness, wearing headphones makes it a lot easier to get hit by a passing biker or accidentally walk into traffic.
Awareness! is an app that tries to solve that problem by allowing you to listen to your iPod while piping in sounds from the world around you. It’s sort of akin to listening to a stereo instead of headphones; you get all the sound around you, via your iPhone’s microphone, while still getting to enjoy your music. Hopefully it’ll help more iPhone music listeners avoid mid-sidewalk collisions.
Finger Drums (iPhone) Free (was $2.99)
It’s pretty simple: you fire up Finger Drums, then you use your digits to play drums.
The app works best over headphones and provides rock, hip-hop and dance drum sets for you to mess around with. The drum kits load up on your screen and then you just tap to play them. Finger Drums is pretty simple — there’s not a function to record your playing, for example, and the app is mostly meant for fun, it seems — but it’s also free and makes a good complement to some of the various iPhone guitar apps that are floating around out there.