iPhone App Watch - Jetset, WordSearch and Textropolis

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There are hundreds of new apps on the iPhone each week. As time permits (every week or so), I'll review a few that I've tried to either help you find the good ones or ward you off the ones that sucked me in that weren't worth the time or money. Here are some of my recent finds:

Jetset Jetset. I love achievements as much as the next person, and the thought of unlocking souvenirs from hundreds of airports sounded like a pursuit worthy of repetitive replay. The premise is that you are airport security trying to shake down would-be travellers against an ever-changing list of prohibited items. It's both political satire and a fun game, right?

This game isn't bad, but you should know that to unlock the airport achievements you must actually travel IN THE REAL WORLD to the actual airports and then play the game well while you're there. It's not enough to be in the city, you must be AT THE AIRPORT. Great if you're an actual jetsetter, but a bit of a ripoff for the rest of us.

Be sure to practice before making that big trip - and ask your travel agent if you can book as many stops as possible to maximize your $5 investment. The semi-cool part is that you can share any souvenirs you collect with your Facebook friends and then they can buy a $1 iPhone app to display your "gift" in a virtual snowglobe. Like that's gonna happen.
 
WordSearch WordSearch. When playing Crosswords DS last year, I found I really loved the word searches - even more than the crosswords! Particularly the mega-big ones that you have to scroll to view in their entirety. I burned through almost all of them and thought perhaps the iPhone could replenish my supply. I stumbed across a trial version of Super Word Find that has some nice, huge puzzles that were fun to play, but it was plagued with typos. I simply cannot stomach mispellings in a word search game - it's just wrong to be scouring a sea of letters for words that have letters transposed or are just plain wrong! So I bought WordSearch, which has a seemingly endless supply of puzzles divided by theme (dinosaurs, movies, pizza toppings, presidents, you name it) but they all fit on one screen. Still, they're pretty good and, for $2, will tide me over until a better one comes along.
 
Textropolis Textropolis. This game had a lot of positive reviews and looked to be deeper than it really is. The premise is that you have to find the hidden words (four or more characters) within the names of cities. After you find 10% of the words for a given city, you earn a star and unlock the next one. You can skip to the next city, or go back to a previous locale and earn more stars - up to 5 for getting ALL of the possible words. There are 30 cities in all, so there's a decent amount of gameplay for $2. But all of the cities look the same and unlocking stars only adds the same skyscrapers and people milling about. The good news is that you don't have to actually travel to the city IN THE REAL WORLD to play it. And each word you find is defined. There's also the option to send a little generic e-mail "postcard" that markets the game to your friends from each town you play. And, yeah, they all look the same too.

OK, so it's a little lame unless you really love text twist games.

I'm playing some other, much better games now that I'll review in coming weeks. And, in the meantime, feel free to recommend any apps you love or regret buying...

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