If you ever let a helium balloon float away when you were a kid and wondered where it eventually ended up, you already know what Balloons for the iPhone is all about. This cute little app lets you launch a virtual balloon with a message and a photo attached. Anyone with the app installed call pull down balloons near them -- Balloons uses the iPhone's location services -- and read messages.

I grabbed a few balloons to see what it was all about, and it was more addictive than I expected. My first balloon was an ad, launched by some marketer near my city (Boo! Hiss!), but then things started getting interesting. I caught a balloon that had drifted from London to Texas to Arizona, picking up new notes along the way. Balloons reminds me of the message-in-a-bottle feeling of the early days of the Internet -- "Hey, who else is out there?"

I tested the Lite version of Balloons, which is free. There's also a $2.99 version that adds the ability to track your balloons, in case you get really serious. TUAW interviewed the developer at this year's WWDC.

Maybe I'm old, but I remember back when arcade games were not powerful enough to do 3D video. Then one day along came a new technology called vector graphics, and 3D games became (sort of) possible. Instead of seeing a fully rendered 3D model of the various objects in the game, you instead would be presented with wireframe representations. Still, in its day vector graphics were amazing.

Fast-forward to today, and you can play a modern game based on classic vector graphics. Vector Conflict: The Siege is a shooting game where your goal is to protect your outpost from an ever-increasing onslaught of enemies. You are literally surrounded on all 4 sides, and need to carefully plan your movements between views (north, south, east, and west) to ensure that none of the baddies sneak up behind you when you are not looking.

Playing Vector Conflict is made quite enjoyable by the forgiving shooting mechanics. As long as you are aiming near an enemy, your weapons will lock on and make destroying it easier. If it sounds like the game is easy, think again. The sheer volume of enemies attacking will make sure that you are never bored.

Make sure you play Vector Conflict with the sound up, as it has one of the most engaging soundtracks of any time waster I've played. In fact, you can download the tracks if you enjoy them as much as I did.

Small Worlds is a beautiful and uniquely relaxing pixel-art platform game created for the Casual Gameplay Design Competition. The point of the game is to move around exploring each level to find he exit.

Though Small Worlds uses the typical side-scrolling view of a platform game, what makes it unique is that you start each level zoomed in tightly on your very simplified character, and you can only see the area immediately around you. Moving about reveals more of the level to you, and the camera pulls back and back so that you can see the big picture of the level you are exploring.

Small Worlds is all about exploration. You're not dealing with the plethora of bad guys that most other platform games have. Instead the enjoyment of the game comes from discovering just where you are, in a relaxed, distinctly non-anxious state.

If most video games make you feel agitated, Explore may just be the game for you. It's a charming little distraction.

Have you ever wondered just how big a red blood cell is in comparison to a grain of salt or the influenza virus? Now you can, visually, using the Cell Size and Scale page on the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center's site.

To be honest, I wasted a bunch of time using this page to look at the various sizes of things, though I can't in good conscience call it a Time Waster. It's too edumacational for that.

I'd love to see this same approach extended to things at a macro size, so that you could zoom from a carbon atom all the way out to the universe. But for now, I'll take this.

Pandemic 2 is a strategy game where you play the part of a virus, bacteria, or parasite. The goal of the game is to infect and then kill all of humanity.

At the start of the game you choose to be either a virus, bacteria, or parasite. Each has their own unique characteristics, like being more or less virulent, and mutating slowly or quickly. Once you've chosen the type of pandemic you represent, you move into the gameplay.

The game starts with you infecting a very small number of people in a specific country. You can then increase the rate of infection by purchasing symptoms, resistances, and modes of infection like airborne and waterborne. You can also slow things down by getting rid of a symptom or resistance, but doing that also costs points, so you need to be careful not to waste your moves.

Pandemic 2 ends when either you win by wiping humankind off of the face of the planet, or the humans successfully develop a vaccine and prevent you from infecting everyone.

There are two modes of play, the traditional simulation mode, and a shorter, simplified mode. The short version of the game can be played in about 10 minutes, making it a good coffee break game.

I'm not a photographer by any means (although I hear Download Squad's newest blogger, Sebastian, is!), and the iPhone's built-in camera isn't exactly the greatest piece of photography equipment around, but the TiltShift Generator iPhone app doesn't really care!

This neat little 99-cent app applies cool toy-camera (think 'dollhouse miniatures') effects and vignetting to any photo, and makes even the crummiest iPhone photographers look good. It can apply two styles of adjustable blur, some color controls and, of course, those hot-looking dark edges.

We've covered ways to fake a tilt-shift effect before on Download Squad - yes, you could just buy a special lens, but software can provide a cheaper approximation - but this is the first on-the-go option I've tried. iPhone features include applying effects to photos you've already taken, saving new photos you take with the app, and sharing via email or Twitter.

If you're not sure where to start with tiltshift photos, try shooting a cluster of objects from above - the creator of the app has done some great-looking stuff with houses and parking lots. Even if you're not too confident in your photographic abilities, shell out a dollar for this app and see what you can do. You might be surprised!

Have you ever wanted your own bag of leftover schwag from SXSW Interactive? Or how about a new laptop bag? Would an AOL USB LED flexible light help you in any way? Check out each of the treat bags below, leave a comment on the pages that describe the treat bags to enter, and in a week we'll randomly choose our winners.

Sorry, limited to US and Canda, restrictions apply, read the rules, etc. and so on below. Happy Halloween from your friends at Download Squad! Each winner also gets a t-shirt or two from LogMeIn, since they sent us a giant bag of shirts.

Treat bag One: the musical coder.

Treat bag Two: the collector.

Treat bag three: the mobile warrior.

NOTE: Do not leave comments on this post -- you can't. You must leave a comment on the post describing the treat bag you wish to enter to win.


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Unsurprisingly, you start off in a room with nothing. It's the de facto rule that all of these Room Escape puzzles share: you don't know how you got there, or why you're there, but damnit -- you're there, and you need to find a way out!


Inculcation is the first room escape game that I've played with real-time combat elements. There are actually monsters -- zombies? -- that pop up and require shooting. Fortunately it's very easy to shoot them dead, but it does mean that you occasionally lose health. There are syringes about the place that can restore your health.

Mostly the gameplay is what you'd expect from such games -- pick up objects, open doors, solve rudimentary riddles that involve some observation skills. It is nothing special in this regard -- in fact, some of the puzzles feel a little random and rely on guesswork rather than applying your knowledge of the game.


I played through the first house in Inculcation, and I can tell you this now: the enhanced elements of music, artistic direction and creatures that can actually kill you really add to the tension, the danger. I admit I yelped out loud a few times. I admit my hand slipped off the mouse a few times when attacked by zombies. I admit I'm a wuss when it comes to the horror genre.

There's one part in the first house where a door shakes -- as if something is behind it, desperately trying to get out -- and it keeps shaking. Over and over. Louder and louder. And when it finally comes to open the door... well... you're in for a big surprise. Give it half an hour of your time at least -- you won't regret it...

[via JayIsGames]

Before there was anything today's Internet users would think of as "web design," there was GeoCities. The homepage service that let absolutely anyone try his or her hand at putting something on the Internet is also one of the cradles of contemporary Web Fugly. In fact, Fugly Friday owes such a debt to the GeoCities aesthetic that this week's installment is going to take a trip down memory lane to look at some early innovations in tearing a human being's eye out using pure HTML.

Today's fugly site, HTML Advanced Tricks & Tips, is a cookbook for everything that make GeoCities sites painful to look at. Tables! Frames! Scrolling marquee text! I will grant you that some people continue to defend tables to this day, but I don't think anyone is defending those animated flame GIFs. Good luck navigating this page by clicking on the text: it's not linked. You're not going anywhere unless you click on those dancing flames. Maybe that's a secret you learn from the "HTML Writer's Guild" once they give you a cool badge like the one on this homepage.

As for the tips themselves? Closing your tags is still decent advice, and cropping and shrinking your graphics was a necessity back in the low-bandwidth heyday of GeoCities. These tips were actually not terrible at the time, but the author has to mess it up by slapping on animated GIFs and encouraging the use of the marquee tag. Between those two, we've covered most of what made every GeoCities page so terrible. Add an autoplaying midi and you'd have a Fugly Tutorial Trifecta.

(This post was made possible by Reocities, a GeoCities rescue attempt that backed up 600,000 pages of potential fugly before Yahoo! shut off GeoCities' animated flashing lights for good.)

Red Remover is one of the all-time classic casual puzzle games, where the object is to remove the red blocks while keeping the other ones from falling. With Halloween coming up, the game is getting into costume as Pumpkin Remover: instead of blocks, you've got rotten pumpkins to get rid of, and fresh ones to defend. It's not just a reskinning of Red Remover, though, it also features some new levels.

Just like Red Remover, Pumpkin Remover presents a lot of physics-based challenges. Some of the obstacles you'll face include ramps, barricades, and weird directional gravity. It might not be the spookiest Halloween-themed game out there, but Pumpkin Remover is a fun expansion for anyone who just can't get enough of this particular style of puzzle game.

Pro Tip: Definitely play through level 5 for a cheesy Halloween joke. I LOL'd.

You'll never guess what the primary purpose of this game is. OK, OK, stop guessing! I'll tell you: you gotta push pumpkins!

But it's not as simple as that. It's not just a Boulderdash clone with Halloween-skinned baddies and pumpkins for stones -- no, it's like some kind of fantastic mash-up of Boulderdash, Mega Man and Pac Man. In Pumpkin Push you play a plucky pumpkin-pushin' protagonist whose primary objective is to clean the world of various undead ghouls. Vampires, ghosts, robot-pumpkins... they're all here and waiting to be vanquished.

While it's still not possible to download a Halloween costume, stepping away from the computer for a few hours to trick or treat or go to a costume party doesn't mean you have to leave the Internet behind. In fact, Know Your Meme has come up with a guide to dressing up as your favorite online meme. They have instructions for everything from Keyboard Cat to the Flying Spaghetti Monster to that rabbit with a pancake on his head.

Unfortunately, because you can't trick-or-treat the Internet (yet), you and your friends might be the only ones who think your costumes are funny. To be fair, though, some of them are really, really funny, and going door-to-door with your kid dressed as the pancake bunny is a guaranteed candy goldmine.

If you're planning to dress up as an Internet meme or something software-related - anybody going as the Mozilla Firefox? - let us know in the comments. And post some photos if you've got them. This is the Internet, after all: pics or it didn't happen!

Fatty Bum Bum is a surreal adventure game from Dutch game developers Hanazuki. You don't actually play as Fatty Bum Bum, who is a large, friendly-looking, hungry character - sort of reminds me of a big Katamari. Instead, you're a kid who's floating through space, trying to collect food to deliver to Fatty Bum Bum, to make him grow as enormous as possible.

The game has three levels, and your food-grabbing abilities get stronger in each one. You start out by using your hands, then graduate to a spaceship with a grabber claw, and finally end up with a chomping crocodile costume. The game is side-scrolling, so you have to slow down as much as possible for maximum goodies. Once a piece of food scrolls off the screen, you lose it for good.

Fatty Bum Bum is a solid kids' game. It's not particularly challenging, although beating the current online high scores looks pretty impossible. Instead, the appeal is in the visuals. Grabbing food can set off fun, colorful animations where you character does a cool stunt or turns into some unexpected animal or object. In terms of gameplay, this slows down the clock (each level is time-limited) and helps you grab more stuff.

[Pro Tip: You can download the game for Mac or PC, and it runs a lot faster on the desktop than in-browser.]