Still prepping for New Year’s? You might want to check out Grid Lens for the big night, an app that lets you take interesting photos and arrange them in grid frames to tell a story. If you’re stuck on what you might wear to your Dec. 31 parties, use Cloth to share your outfits and get some feedback on them. You can spend the rest of the weekend playing today’s crop of games: Jailhouse Jack makes you the director of a film in which you need to guide your star through various side-scrolling puzzles, and Night of the Living Dead Defense mixes tower defense with the classic George A. Romero zombie flick.
Grid Lens (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
There are lots of post-production photo apps in the iTunes App Store. Grid Lens does something a little different from the pack by allowing your photos to tell their own story, simply by setting them apart in a grid formation. You can snap one photo or many and arrange them within the grid to show, for example, multiple views of the same subject, or to cut the same photo into several smaller pieces to gain a specific effect.
Grid Lens lets you import photos from your camera roll, or start with a pre-set grid that you can then snap photos for by tapping each portion of the frame. The app supports six different filters you can add to shots after the fact, as well as multiple grid set-ups, and Grid Lens will even add grids to your shots randomly if you want. When you’re done arranging and editing, you can share your project with others by email or integration with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
Cloth (iPhone, iPad) $1.99
Proud of an outfit you intend to face the day in, or just looking for some fashion advice? Snap a shot of what you’re wearing with Cloth and you can quickly share it with friends and get feedback. You can save your favorite outfits in the app and add tags and notes to them, share your clothes with friends across various social networks with one tap, and organize them by category to keep track of them all.
In addition to sharing your outfit ideas with others, Cloth also offers a bit of fun. The more you upload and share outfits, the more points and badges you can earn within the app, turning sharing and arranging outfits into a bit of a game. The app also has a slick user interface and lots of privacy options for your benefit.
Jailhouse Jack (iPhone, iPad) $0.99
You don’t control protagonist Jailhouse Jack directly in this side-scrolling puzzler. Instead, you play The Director, and what you’re really setting up is a film set in which escaping prisoner Jack is the star. In each of the game’s levels, you need to set things up to lead Jack through each scene, picking up money bags along the way to score points before ending the scene. Once you’ve set up everything you need to direct Jack where he needs to go, you roll the film and watch him to go action.
The more money Jack picks up in each level, the better your score, but getting him where he needs to go can be tough. Some objects can be moved around the screen, and you’ll be able to leave markers that cause Jack to do actions like jump in order to get him where you need him. It’s an interesting premise on a tried-and-true puzzler genre.
Night of the Living Dead Defense (iPhone, iPad) $1.99
Based on tower defense title GRave Defense HD, Night of the Living Dead Defense takes its setting from the classic 1968 horror film, putting you in the locales seen in George A. Romero’s masterpiece and requiring you to fight off the living dead. You’ll set up “gunners,” characters tasked with the defense of the farm house seen in the movie, and use money to purchase upgrades and the like to keep them fighting the endless waves of zombies.
It should be noted that Night of the Living Dead Defense is pretty graphic and bloody, but it also has solid tower defense mechanics and is quite a bit of fun for zombie fans. It includes four difficulty modes, music and images from the original film, and Game Center support to provide achievements and leaderboards.
