Temple King

After conquering Hearts, Spades, Euchere and many other games on my iPhone, I enlisted some friends to help suggest some mobile games for my phone to pass the time when on the train and just killing time. For someone who reviews video games for a living it was strange to ask others for suggestions here, but it's just not an area I deal with all that often so luckily I have slacker friends who had suggestions.

My buddy Dboy's suggestion was the popular game called Temple Run. It's a pretty simple game of running, jumping, sliding and getting rich. You collect coins in a game where the speed constantly increases and the crevasses get wider and the difficulty ramps up quickly. Quick thinking, that is what is needed. Kinda like Indiana Jones, but without a young Alfred Molina holding me back.

Well I got it, baby. Only took me a couple months, but I've become the Temple King. It's a self-proclaimed title, mind you. But it's true. I've unlocked all the characters and won all 36 achievements the game offers (and some of them are damn hard). Anyway, it's another step along the way and another notch in the totem pole of my greatness in video games. Or as the wife calls it, "the title no one cares about but you."

My Reading Challenge

I'm probably doing something really stupid, but I gotta give it a try. With the new iPhone, one of the apps that it offers for free is the iBooks app, which is mainly for reading books on an iPad. When the wife got an iPad, to test the iBooks app she bought the latest book from one of our favorite authors, Richard North Patterson.

So instead of waiting for her to be done with it on the iPad or spend the money to buy it in paperback, I'm going to test myself by reading the entire book on my iPhone. It may go well, it may be a nightmare. That tiny screen for reading a full-length book? It's one thing to read a 500-page book when you hold that thing in your hands. Holding this in your hands once it's optimized for the iPhone, the thing is 1,081 pages (screens?) long. Holy crap.

So we'll see how this goes.

UPDATE: 20 pages in, and I've already had to up the font size so that I can read it better and not feel like I'm getting stabbed in the eyes. But upping the font size make the page count now 1,266. Damnit. This might be in the top 10 of dumbest things I've attempted. And this might be the project that makes me get glasses. Crap.