Tag Archives: iOS

With Hearthstone on the iPhone now, my battery is surely forfeit.

The long-awaited update to the iOS version of Hearthstone was released this afternoon, and will soon™ be on the Android handsets that can support it. I downloaded it, which didn’t take long at all, and gave it a whirl since I could burn the five minutes it would take to play through a casual match to unlock the free pack they’re giving away for completing your first game with an iPhone.

It took five minutes. I beat a custom Warrior with a basic Rogue deck. Cha-ching: free pack.

First thing’s first, with the condensed UI, you should consider tapping the board as a menu escape method if you need to zoom all the way out from looking at your hand and just considering what’s on the table. Otherwise, it’s best to operate one tap at a time to reduce the possibility of messing up what moves you’re going to make in your turn. Assigning minions to attack specific targets still works in the logical sense—sliding from the attacking minion to the minion you wish to damage—but avoid swiping from the bottom edge in quick succession, due to bottom drawer’s triggerbeing ‘any upward swipe from the bottom edge.’

Other than that, there are minor quality of life improvements made to the UI so that you don’t have to tap on the screen additional times to get things done, such as opening packs. No more dragging a pack and then clicking an ‘open’ button. You drag the pack, you get your cards—nice and simple.

I’ll add more in the future as play more games of Hearthstone. As far as progress, I’ve not completely unlocked all of the basic decks for all nine classes, but I’m getting there. I haven’t played a solo adventure since I unlocked the casual matchmaking feature, so I’m getting slowly used to the meta. I even have a couple of custom decks, but I don’t own nearly enough of the cards that exist to really use a custom deck in a match.

Oh, and also:

But it’s only available for download on the Amazon Appstore, at the moment. Which is LOLtastic.

Well, now all of the Android people can play cards now!

Patch notes can be fun, too.



Medium’s iOS development team sure does know what users want to see. I mean, write me a song and I’ll scroll on down to keep reading what you’ve written.

The bigger picture here? Medium’s iOS client now allows its users to do something that most blog services would have included in their app from the get-go: write posts. I’ve been looking forward to thus update, as being able to manage a blog from my iPhone is part of what I’m looking for in a blog platform–something that WordPress has solidly allowed me to do for quite awhile now. This Medium update ticks that box, and promotes it from a “once in a blue moon” option to a legitimate contender for my attention.

I’m all for that. Even if, ultimately, I end up only cross-posting ~serious~ posts in the future, I think the Medium client is a huge step forward for the service. In an age where Twitlonger is still the preferred vector for longer-than-a-tweet posts, Medium should thrive the Twitlonger service eventually becomes disliked for serving ads.

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E28 and S3E29.

Yeah, double post. Because holidays.

  • TV integration is half of the point of the Xbox One, isn’t it? This joke is trying to be funny. Eh.
  • Goth Kathleen on this episode? I don’t even.
  • Another DragonBall Z game that’s better than most of the television series? Standard.
  • Nintendo’s naming schemes for their first-party games reeks of some sort of Engrish that was corrected by native-English speakers for the sake of trying to save what’s left of Nintendo’s honor as a great gaming company. The only two titles holding that honor as close as possible are the latest Fire Emblem and Zelda titles for their 3DS handheld as far as I can tell.
  • I fully support CheckPoint being included in MSFT’s Xbox Live content plan for the upcoming year. They used to have Major Nelson and those two Brits do stuff on nearly a weekly basis. Why not bring those guys back? Oh wait–because Larry Hyrb is nothing more than a corporate mouthpiece and the two gamer tag show people weren’t funny at all.
  • More Nintendo news? STOP IT.
  • EA is just stealthily trying to rip off new IP to blow them up into the annual sequel plan, as most of their studios seem to be actually trying to make great new games for the latest generation, with this hackathon business.
  • Baww. But they’re Canadian, right? DEM JOKES, FOLKS.
  • Zach Galifinakis as Sonic? Comedy and game-to-film adaptations must be the two worst genre of movies that exist. Combining them surely creates a black hole of cinema, right?

  • A console commentary! Yaaay~!
  • Shin Megami Tensai 4 and Saints’ Row 4 as their games of the year? Boo.
  • ShiftyLook has some pretty funny stuff. The latest Scott & Kris creation is published there. And now a dating sim based on classic Namco properties’ characters? And the ship from Galaga is a romantic option? Is this the new CandyBox? It could be the new CandyBox.
  • A Tomb Raider card game for iOS? PASS.
  • A tie at retail but a clear win for the PS4 when you consider the second-hand market. Although the same number of systems have been sold overall… so maybe it’s still more of a tie, with the stipulation that PS4 owners are more likely to throw obscene amounts of money away in marked up prices.
  • Zoo… what?
  • A best-of-season sequence masqueraded as a finale review. Pretty good stuff.
  • DANCIN’

And the ultimate sad news: I’m not going to cover this anymore if it means having to watch Twitch videos-on-demand. Having to watch unskippable pre-roll commercials longer than 10 seconds is not acceptable. I hope they continue posting these episodes to YouTube.