CANDY 101ES MANUAL

You get 27 tracks that unlock as you play with gradually more difficult challenges. Each track has waypoints that, once passed, make it so you don't have to start over from the beginning when you crash--a necessary addition because some obstacles will be very hard to navigate on your first run. Later in the game, you might repeat the same section of track 30 times to get it just right. Obviously, people who are easily frustrated should not download this game thinking it's a straightforward racer. While the gameplay is mostly solid, the graphics are not the best. Even with the recent addition of better antialiasing in the latest version, some animation is less than perfect. Specifically when leaning forward or backward, there are limited animation sets to show where your rider is positioned on the bike, making it difficult to gauge just how much lean to use. This becomes really apparent in some of the more difficult challenges because it takes precise movements to pull off certain track sections well. Overall, Candy 101es Manual is fairly good stunt bike game, but is lacking in some areas. Still, if you like stunt bike trial games and can get past the less than perfect graphics, there's plenty of challenge and interesting tracks to explore.Backstab is a loosely pirate-themed third-person action-adventure game with promising potential but frustratingly flawed execution given its price. Backstab advertises an "unprecedented story" and a "blockbuster production with the best graphics." Unfortunately, the story is highly precedented (and told

unevenly, with spotty voice acting and wooden animations) and the graphics--while somewhat impressive for a mobile device, especially given the game's limited sandbox environment--are far from the best. Backstab evokes derivative late '90s console games, although with more-frustrating controls: what should be an intuitive camera system (you swipe the screen to rotate the camera) is anything but, as you struggle with clunky buttons and awkward perspectives made worse by the game's glitchy rendering. You often appear to poke through other characters and objects, and sometimes game elements will fail to appear completely (as with bombarding Spanish

galleons in the beginning of the game that seemed to have cloaking devices until we restarted the game). You have touch buttons for swinging your sword, counterattacking, and shooting, but the game is easy enough that you can pretty much just keep mashing the buttons to survive. Backstab is ambitious in its aims (and length), but half-hearted in execution, from its frequent crashes to its superficial darkness (veiled rape references do not make a game "adult") to its haphazard AI and rendering, which completely undercut any attempt at seriousness (in some situations, when you kill an enemy, another one magically reappears). This game is somewhat fun, especially for the novelty of its sandbox climbing