Despite it being an unusually busy time of year for me, coupled with some very muggy weather here in old London town, I still managed to rustle up the energy to play on my iPad and recommend a couple of gems for you.

Sid Meier’s Pirates

In an effort to escape the sticky temperatures this week, I took to the high seas. I should warn you from the very start that this game has the potential to distort time. A few hours playing Sid Meier’s Pirates can actually seem like just a few minutes. I was rather taken back at just how immersed I was pillaging and cursing my way through the Caribbean. The game itself has a long tradition having been originally released in 1987, before being remade in 2004. So I guess it was only natural for an iPad version to make its way into the App Store a few weeks ago.

Pirates is an open world adventure, one in which you play a privateer who seeks both long lost family, fame and fortune (though I admit I was more tempted by the fame and fortune). The background to the game is that ten years earlier your family was enslaved due to a debt they could not pay and taken off by an unsavoury Spanish character. Having escaped capture yourself you found yourself at sea, and since worked your way up to being in charge of a ship and crew in the Caribbean . While you have free rein to go wherever you’d like and do whatever you’d like, there is a backstory about discovering what happened to your long lost family. So ports in the game potentially offer both quests and valuable hints about your missing family. You pick up quests in ports either at the governor’s mansion or in the tavern (which is also where you can add to your crew and buy special trinkets which will help you later).There is a variety of actions to keep you entertained, from trading, working on your reputation, battling on land and sea and even romancing the odd Governor’s daughter. You have a crew that you also have to keep both fed and happy (in the form of giving them enough gold and action).

The game has been redesigned somewhat for its iPad release in order to incorporate the device’s touchscreen, and to be honest, if you didn’t know better you shouldn’t feel silly to think the game has been originally designed for the device. Pirates has enough variation to ensure that, with all the various options about what direction to take your career, it can be replayed over and over and over again without it ever being exactly the same. My only criticism of the app is that it would have been useful if a full game manual had been provided. There are so many different things that can happen and you can do, that the few provided mini-tutorial screens don’t always deliver enough information about what is going on. But please don’t let this put you off as overall this is a rum fuelled broadside of a game with a good smattering of fun and excellent use of the touchscreen.

Animation Desk

Now this next app isn’t a game (yes I know, shock, horror – hang me up and let buzzards peck my eyes out), but in my defense it is a lot of fun! The application allows you to create simple animations that you can then export out to Facebook, youtube or your own photo library. The drawing interface provided by the app resembles the real working environment of a professional animator who completes each frame of an animation on an animation desk. Drawing is simple, just select the type of tool you want to use (pen, pencil, brush) and the color you want from the paint pots, and away you go. The app also lets you draw an image and then gives you the option of the next frame being another blank canvas or a transparent version of your first drawing (which is useful for animation purposes as it allows you to judge how much movement you want). It offers three different view modes: the desk view, the film strip view and a full screen view. The film strip view is good if you want to move the images around in the timeflow. The app also offers help via a question mark icon, which if pressed introduces you to the various functions and features.

Overall, the user interface is good, and easy to navigate. You can get started quickly and produce your first animations within minutes. On the down side, the design of the color palette could have been refined in my opinion, and there is a lack of options in terms of pen and brush sizes. Despite its professional visual design, Animation Desk is easy to engage with and offers an enjoyable quick animation production fix. The iPad’s screen size lends itself perfectly to something like this. This is the type of application that could definitely be of use to anyone, especially aspiring animators who need to sketch out ideas quickly.