Chances are you've played Riptide GP on your Android. If you haven't, you've surely heard others rave about it (it's a staff favorite around here) and should have probably checked it out before now. C'est la vie. The good news is that the sequel is out, and it keeps everything great from the original and adds multiplayer and game options that make it my new favorite.

Vector Unit has outdone themselves. The same great watercraft action you loved in Riptide GP is there, along with multiplayer, Google+ login and cloud sync, and customization options for your vehicles like we see in other high-end racing games. You earn credits by competing in races, and use those credits to buy performance improvements for your existing ride or save them up to buy an all new, and hopefully better one from the store. Of course there is an in-app purchase mechanism, but by no means is it necessary to buy credits -- winning them is far too fun. 

The multiplayer and social aspect is also great. Race against up to three of your friends in real-time through Google+, and if you have more than one Android the cloud sync keeps track of your progress flawlessly. My wife and I have been thoroughly enjoying Riptide GP 2 and the multiplayer fun, and I'm pretty sure you will, too. 

Riptide GP 2 will play well on any high-end Android device, but playing on a Tegra-powered system really shines. Riptide GP 2 is the first game you'll want to buy if you have ordered a Shield. It is that much fun.

Stop what you're doing and download Wind-up Knight for Android.

Wind-up Knight is a side-scroller that's reminscient of Super Mario Brothers -- you'll be collecting coins while dispatching creatures, all in the name of saving a princess. But it's not a mere two-dimensional side-scroller -- this sucker's got depth. And the graphics, while simple, also don't overpower the gameplay, a problem we've seen in other games. The controls are simple as well. Your character runs on his own (hint: You'll need to go left sometimes), and you're left iwth jumping and rolling and attacking.

Wind-up Knight is a free game, but you'll need to collect weapons and armor along the way. And you can upgrade as quickly as you want, thanks to in-app purchasing. Want a bad-ass sword without having to save up currency? You can buy 10,000 Note for a $9.99US. Of course, that's the trick, right? You'll likely end up spending far more within the game than you would if you paid $1.99, or $2.99 -- heck, we'd probably easily go $5 for Wind-up Knight -- up front. But on the other hand, with 50 levels and great gameplay, you're getting your money's worth. And you don't actually have to purchase the more-expensive weapons to complete the game. But it's very, very tempting.

One downside of all that in-app purchasing, though, is that you can't switch devices. If you upgrade on a tablet, you won't have those weapons and armor on a phone, unless you repurchase them. (Hopefully Google does something about that at some point.

Anyhoo, we've distracted you long enough. Hit up the download links and check out our hands-on video after the break.

Sometimes I come across a game that makes me feel really dumb really challenges the ol' noggin of mine, and I know I just have to share it with you all, the Android faithful (because Android users are inherently smart). Apparatus is one such game, and by the time you're done with it, you'll deserve either a pat on the back or a tasty cold one (or both).

If the name didn't completely give it away, Apparatus is about just that: building apparatuses. To do what, you may ask? To make sure a dark blue ball makes it's way safely into a sky blue box. That's it.

Now if you're wondering what makes Apparatus so difficult, it's because the game uses physics and all, so if any of your parts aren't stable and attached to something, they'll fall away into the nothingness pit that makes up the bottom of the screen.

Fortunately there's no penalty for completely botching the job (sometimes it's the only way to learn what's going on), and a simple tap of the pause button will get all of your objects reset on the screen.

For the first couple of levels there are hints that'll show you the ropes on apparatus-building (like how batteries work, how to tell which way your plank of wood will spin, and how to attach pieces of material together), so you're not totally out in the cold, but once you've been taught the basics, it's up to your own ingenuity to get the job done.

Perhaps even more amazing than the levels the game has you work through are the community-designed levels and the sandbox. From within the sandbox, you can build either an apparatus or a building challenge. When you're done designing your masterpiece, you can upload it to the community levels to people can try and beat it or just watch it unfold.

It's absolutely amazing to see someone construct a rudimentary gun using only these simple tools, or an impressive fireworks show with the only trigger being a wheel rolling over them, and more than makes this app worth its price.

Apparatus feel like one of those "must have" games on Android. It's cheap, forces you to be creative, and is filled with levels. Even if you never touch the main game, the sandbox and community sections can easily take hours out of your otherwise productive day, as you build and see what others have built. In a word, it's stellar.

Apparatus is $2.45 in the Android Market.

Perfectly Clear was launched in Google Play this week with a bevy of quick photograph fixes. Simple sliders can change exposure, depth of field, sharpening, vibrancy, tint, darkness, and skin tone individually, or apply all of them at once with the one-tap Fix button. The app shows your picture with a very cool before and after comparison.

The core app is available for $0.99 as an introductory offer, which will soon be bumped up to $1.99. There are a few extra correction filters that are available through a single in-app purchase that includes skin smoothing, eye enhancement and tooth whitening, but the vast majority of fixes are available without having to buy anything extra.

The app’s UI is for the most part great. The sliding bar that you can swipe back and forth over your image provides a really clear distinction on how an image is being improved. Unfortunately, on the smaller screen, it’s hard to make out the finer changes until the export is made and you see it on a computer monitor.

Every adjustment is made with a single slider, with a tiny switch to toggle them on or off, which makes what would normally be complex adjustments very accessible to just about anybody. Both landscape and portrait orientations of the app are available, which makes it flexible enough to work with no matter what kind of picture you’re taking.

Perfectly Clear includes the ability to process multiple files, but the file selector is pretty crappy. Many of the thumbnails pulled up are duplicates, and they aren’t in a particularly great layout (despite having fancy animations when picked). Often it won’t even load up the pictures that I select, or show everything that’s in my camera gallery. Your best bet is to launch into the camera directly from the app.

My only other usability complaint is that the app regularly stalls on checking user licenses.

Function

Perfectly Clear is a great app for simply making your mobile pictures look great. You aren’t going to find a lot of artsy-fartsy filters here, but that’s totally fine - you can make great-looking pictures without those. The simplified adjustments may not be rich enough for hardcore photographers that want to screw around with stuff like white balance and levels, but for the average Joe Shmo that doesn’t have any idea what those things are, this set-up is perfect.

The picture selection menu still needs a lot of work done, but the breadth of corrections and processing makes Perfectly Clear with the $0.99 pricetag.

Recording what's happening on your Android device's screen has always been a bit of an anomaly. There options were few and far between (one, two tops) and the frame rates you'd get from them weren't top-notch. Then, all of a sudden, like a beacon of hope and progress towards a better future, ScreenCast & Screen Recorder appeared.

ScreenCast & Screen Recorder is as simple to use as they come. Hit the big red record button on the main screen and you're good to go.

There also are a couple of settings in ScreenCast & Screen Recorder, like the ability to choose normal or high quality, pick the frames per second you want to record at, or define the default file name for your videos. It's pretty bare, but it doesn't need to be comprehensive. They are just screen recordings, after all.

There's also a built-in gallery where you can open and watch your videos, but be assured, everything still shows up in Android's gallery, too. Rounding it all out is the benchmark options, which stress tests your system to try and see what the maximum fps you can record at is.

ScreenCast & Screen Recorder doesn't do live streaming nor can it take screesnshots, but the developers says those are both features being worked on.

ScreenCast & Screen Recorder has both a free version and a paid version for $2.99. The free version is merely to let you see how the app works (and that it works at all) and only lets you record 30 seconds of video. Spring for the real thing and pay the three bucks. It's totally worth it.

Take a time machine back to 1943 to make bombing runs in the Pacific

 

A popular iOS game for years (yes, years) has finally made its way over to Android, and is packing many gameplay features that took two full game releases to hit the other platform. iBomber is a top-down plane bombing game set in the WWII era, with quality graphics and gameplay that won't blow you away but will certainly leave you satisfied. The game mechanics itself are simple to pick up, but are deceptively hard to master.

iBomber is a great game to spend some time on, so stick around after the break and learn a little more about the title before you give it a shot for yourself.

 

There isn't a whole lot to iBomber on the surface, and you quickly see that this isn't meant to be an extremely deep game to get into. You're just three taps away from playing the first level when you enter the game, which quickly has you selecting your plane (of which you can only select one to start with) and hopping into the first mission. The missions are grouped by areas of attack, each with a set of objectives to accomplish in order to complete the level. The objectives range from attacking certain ships in the sea to defending your own ships coming in and hitting specific enemy land resources.

The entire game is based on a top-down view as a bomber pilot, with a simple UI that doesn't give you too many options to look at. The center of the screen has crosshairs that indicate where you're aiming the bombs, and a large red "Bombs Away" button on the left is pretty self explanatory. Tapping on a toggle switch pauses the game and shows your objective list, as well as options to upgrade your bombs and calibrate your settings. We would really prefer if there were some UI element that could show the progress of your objectives on the main screen rather than hidden behind a pause menu, though.

 

 

One of the best features of Android is that different portions of the interface can be changed to the user's liking, especially the keyboard. Even with drastic improvements in the stock Android keyboard in the last few iterations, one size certainly doesn't fit all. If you're considering trying out replacement keyboards on your phone or tablet, Adaptxt Keyboard should be on the list for your consideration.

Read on past the break to learn a little more about Adaptxt Keyboard and how it could be the next keyboard you choose to use.

There are two main parts to Adaptxt that each make it a compelling choice independently. First, the keyboard mechanics and features are top-notch, and offer a lot of poweruser (err, powertyper?) features with few unnecessary frills out of the box. On top of a solid core set of components, a $0.99 in-app purchase unlocks a whole host of customization options that will make even the most enthusiastic customizers among us happy. The settings menu design is decidedly of the Gingerbread era, but the keyboard itself is sleek and looks great even on Jelly Bean.

The keys themselves are in a pretty standard configuration, but every single key has a long-press function. The top is a standard number row, but the second row holds your common punctuation and the third some less common punctuation. Long pressing the period gives a share intent, which interestingly will share whatever text you have entered to anywhere you select. We could see this being useful if you're looking to cross-post a status between Twitter and Google+, and instead of writing then copying you could hit the share key after composing one and share it to both. It's a long shot on whether or not that's useful to even a majority of users, but it's cool to have

There's a common set of features that most keyboards have as well, such as word prediction, auto-correction and personal dictionaries. Similar to a feature from Swiftkey, Adaptxt can "learn" your typing style from both Facebook and Twitter. There's also a function called "Automatic Text Replacement", or ATR, that lets you use small letter combinations to spell out longer words or phrases. They're completely user-configured, and reminds us of the way TextExpander works on the Mac. The example in Adaptxt by default is the string "hru", which expands to "Hi, how are you?". When you type "hru" into a text field, the center suggestion in the top bar of the keyboard shows "+hru" -- tap that, and it expands to give the full text. This is something that goes above and beyond what normal word prediction does, and could save you a lot of unnecessary taps.

The video camera on your Android phone just became a lot more fun to use thanks to FxGuru. If you ever wanted to have a T-Rex crash your brother's Little League game, or drop a piano on your mother-in-law, or just weasel out of cutting the grass because a part of Skylab fell in the yard, now you can! OK, not really but it can look like it happened, and that's more fun than cleaning up after a T-Rex.

The app is easy to use. You pick the effect you want, hit the OK button, and start recording. There's an overlay on your screen of where the magic will happen so you know just how to keep things lined up. When you're done, you can select a filter and boost the audio, and it saved to an mp4 video right on your phone.

There are seven free effects included -- Breaking News, Birthday Bot, Dancing Droid, Piano Drop,Satellite Crash, UFO Shuttle and TNT Barrel -- and you can download plenty of others for 99-cents each or $4.69 for six in a pack. The free effects are limited to 480p recording, but the paid ones will allow HD recording.

I'm having entirely too much fun with this one. Hit the Google Play link below and check it out.

A game doesn't have to be complicated to offer hours of fun

There are in-depth and wonderful games that require hours and days of your time to complete, and then there are the equally necessary games that draw you away from reality for just a few minutes at a time. 2Fuse is in the latter group, and executes on that premise quite well. It's a quick and dead simple puzzle game with just a few rules and some fun animations and sounds to keep it lively, paired with a gameplay model that will keep things fresh no matter how many times you play.

Just because a game is simple doesn't mean it needs to be overlooked -- stick around after the break and learn a little bit more about 2Fuse, a new puzzle game on Android.
There are just a few simple rules to understand in order to play 2Fuse, but that doesn't mean it's an easy game to master. When you enter the game to play for the first time, you'll be given a quick tutorial of the game mechanics, which break down pretty simply. The game consists of a 4 by 4 grid of boxes, each having either "1", "2", "3" or a star in them and being either green, red or blue. Your goal is to match up pairs of boxes that are both the same color and type (same number or star), tapping to combine them. Pairing up two "1" boxes creates a single "2" box, and pairing two of those gives you a single "star" box. When you combine the star boxes, you're given different bonuses to help you score higher depending on the color of the boxes you combined -- red for a point multiplier, blue for a time slowdown and green for an instant refresh of available boxes on the screen.

  

As you pair up the boxes, the open spaces are re-populated with new "1" boxes, which you then continue to combine over and over again. Your goal for 2Fuse is to combine as many boxes as possible before the 60 second timer runs out for the round. You receive points based on the boxes combined, along with whatever bonuses you have associated with them and the combos you put together without making a mistake. As you play, you'll see a bar counting down the amount of time you have left in the round, as well as the status of your bonuses and your score vs. the highest score you've ever had -- but you'll be so frantically tapping pairs of boxes to pay attention to those.