Eighteen new cars have been designed for this one, starting at small dune buggies and working up to ultra-fast supercars.  You can race them along 24 routes that are both paved and dirt (some both).

Arcade Mode is a cool way to play without commitment, taking one of 40 pre-defined challenges for a few minutes.  For the longer term, you can play in Career Mode to start small and earn money with your races to upgrade your vehicle until you finally get to the big leagues.  Finally, in Single Event Mode, you can race in a one-shot run (as a full race, a Hot Lap, or an Elimination event) against your friends on WiFi.

The coolest part are the car customizations you can make.  You can add parts to tune your car to your specific style of play, so if you’re hard on the corners or tend to stand on the pedal, you can adjust the car to respond the way you’d like.

This makes it possible to power slide through corners, romp the accelerator before hitting a bump, commit to hard cornering, and more.

The graphics are awesome, but they really pop if you have an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S, taking advantage of the superior graphics they offer to improve shading and add to the 3D effect of the game.

You can even play over the Internet and you have all of your race characters from the original plus more, making 17 in all.

Really awesome game that will have you pumped as you play!

The new app, which unlike previous apps such as competitor Square, requires no external add-ons for the phone in order to work.  Rather than reading the card via the magnetic strip through an add-on dongle swipe reader, the app reads the card’s imprint to get the account number, cardholder’s name, expiration date, etc.

The app works by creating a window-like frame on the phone’s screen into which the card is “placed” by holding it in front of the phone’s camera.  The app then reads the card and lets the user know it’s got the data, which is displayed for confirmation.  Then all the merchant has to do is send the information through their processor, verify the charge, and the sale is complete.

In addition to the new software, Card.io is launching a software developer’s kit (SDK) for the app that allows developers to create customized or specific uses for the application, such as integration with popular website card processing apps or merchant gateways.  Potentially, developers could also utilize the app to recognize things other than cards, such as business cards or other items.

So far, more than 160 apps, including most of the popular processing gateways as well as top-level merchants like Newegg, have integrated with Card.io.

Very cool and enabling.

Your job is to help the flightless horndogs across the chasms and safely to the spawning ground so they can get their groove on.

The game is a sort of 2D puzzle adventure mixed with some fun scenery and a great premise.  Unlike some games of its type, it’s not full of environmental messages and preaching.  It’s just lusty penguins trying to make a new generation of penguins.

The game is by veteran app game maker Polarbit (Reckless Getaway, Tank Riders, Wave Blazer) and is only a dollar in the App Store.  It’s compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad with iOS 3.0 or higher.

Penguin Palooza is a lot of fun as your penguins hurl themselves at various angles or towards helpful tools or on-screen bonuses.  You direct them what to do and then hope for the best.  The more penguins you get across each chasm, the higher your score.

Definitely addictive and fun, the game is well worth the download.  Try it!

Today, let’s think about resolutions and how you can use some new ones to better utilize social media this year.

#1 – Use social media to.. be social.  Not to gain a huge following or build a big network or drive more hits to your website.. just use social media to socialize.  You’ll find that the other things follow once you grasp that fundamental.

#2 – Share photos on a bigger network.  Facebook is great and all, but you limit yourself when you post your photos there.  Using a site like Flickr can mean much broader syndication of your photos across networks, allowing for more exposure and easier access by friends and family (or colleagues or whomever you’re targeting).

#3 – Consider using an open license for your work.  Rather than going with restrictive, heavy copyright protections on your blog posts and media, try using a Creative Commons approach instead.  For those things you do for marketing and brand awareness – such as blogging – this can mean much wider syndication and thus more exposure.

#5 – Watch the details.  Many people get so caught up in their socializing that they miss important details.  Like whether they did all five resolutions in a list.  Stop and smell the roses once in a while.

But fewer and fewer major brand companies are unveiling new products at the show.  Press events have proven that, with only a handful of new major products being announced on the traditional Sunday press unveilings.

Instead, the show is more about small gadgets and more and more it’s about foreign gadgetiers – especially Asian companies – showing off their wares.  Apple never releases new items at CES, neither does Microsoft, and Amazon chose to go solo with a non-CES press event for thier Kindle Fire unveil as well.

Instead, CES is mainly becoming about televisions, audio equipment, and so on.  In fact, this year marks the last that Microsoft will be at the show at all and no major CEO of any large computer or telecomm company is keynote speaking at CES with the exception of Microsoft’s Ballmer.  Hewlett-Packard did its last CES appearance in 2009 and Dell left soon after.

The show will have about 1,000 less vendors thsi year compared to last and attendance is expected to be slower, down by 8-10,000.

The show’s promoters like to say that it has “no rivals” in the industry, but that may be because there is no longer a call for events like this.  More localized, specialized events like South by Southwest (SXSW) seem to be gaining popularity as CES wanes.

Perhaps it’s the end of an era then.

The game was made by developers involved in Minigore, Death Rally, Aqua Globs, and Angry Birds.  It can be played on its own or with friends.  It also includes a full-featured level editor that lets you make your own levels to share with friends or the Bike Baron world at large.

The game play is amazingly addictive and will keep you playing for hours.  So don’t play this game if you have no free time.  It also gets regular updates and lots of new player maps, so it never gets boring.

In fact, more than 32,000 user levels have been made thus far and the number keeps growing.  It’s a very popular game!

On the iPhone 3 and 4, it looks very good.  On the 4S and iPad 2, the graphics are really awesome.  It also plays on the iPod Touch 4th generation and the 32+GB 3rd generations as well.

Definitely a game worth trying (if you have the time) and are interested in something very new, unique, and totally fun. You’ll find it in the iTunes store.

The current favorite is Mini Motor Racing, which is a simple cartoonish motorized racing game.  It’s top-down racing game in 3D with some fun locations.  As you play, you can win points to upgrade your vehicle (or buy a new one) with each vehicle having more than one way to make it better, depending on your racing style.  You can play with up to four players when linked.

Fruit Boom is another imaginative and fun game.  This one sounds like it’s be warfare, but it’s actually a sort of battle and time management mashup.  As the local “Fruiterer,” your job is to collect fruits of the same type and throw them in the squeezer (press) to make fruit treats.  Screw up and things can get really hairy..  Tons of fun and very addicting.

Binary Mill has other games like Assault Squadron, Gun Club 2, Al Lowe’s Comedy Club, etc.  A new addition that’s very unusual is the Decide-o-Tron 8000, an app that works sort of like a Pandora for your game apps.  It watches your preferences and play style and learns your personality.  It then suggests games for you so you don’t have to flip through your catalog of owned games to decide what to play.  It even works on multiple platforms, so if you’re a PS/3 or Portable player, Xbox user, etc, then it will work there too.  Fun idea.

Definitely cool stuff coming out of this app house.

The text of the book covers the zoology of the skulls themselves, a history of how skulls have appeared (and in what context) in art and culture, and more.

When you hold your iPad vertically, it shows the text in black on white to make it easy to read.  To best view the graphics, you rotate your iPad and it shifts to white on black for optimum graphics display.  It’s a great idea that shows just one little detail that makes this a game-changing book for the tablet.

While viewing graphics, you can pinch to zoom or expand and use your finger to drag and move the graphics.  Flicking your finger has it spinning slowly or fast, depending on how fast you move your finger.

You can also turn on the spoken word version and have the author read the text to you, synchronized to what’s shown on the page.  Detailed notes of every species shown plus a comparison feature to compare skulls (up to four at a time) is also available.

Truly a learning tool and ebook that goes beyond the norm.  This might be the most innovative iPad app in 2011.

This is a new game for the iPad that uses the tablet’s camera to detect your motion.  From that, it moves the character on the screen as you pilot him through his river adventure.

The game itself is not really anything new.  Slider games like this have been around since before Mario even hit the screen.  What’s different is the controls.  Following the trend in console games and controllers, Fuego’s uses your body movements to control the character on screen rather than tilting the tablet or pushing buttons.

That, in itself, is both really innovative and what makes this game a lot of fun to play.

Your movements: swaying, ducking, jumping, moving side to side..  they all translate to the game and cause Fuego to mimic you.  Using these movements, you pilot him through levels of river running, grabbing coins and bonuses as you go while avoiding pitfalls and  traps.

The following video makes the game play look goofy, but it’s fun and addicting.

Unless you’re a smoker.  Then maybe not as much. 

CineXPlayer has become the first and only iOS app to integrate Dolby Digital Plus into its playback.  This changes how the playback sounds dramatically and makes the upgrade to v2.5 well worth it.

I talked with NPX Software, which makes CineXPlayer, about their product and this upgrade.

“NXP Software aims to help people enjoy life to the full by delivering outstanding mobile multimedia experiences. That vision has seen CineXPlayer become a top video player in Apple’s App Store.  Many of our fans asked us to add true multi-channel sound.”

The app still allows you to move Xvid movies and content directly from one device to another without converting them, making it one of the easiest apps to use on your iOS devices, I think.  I use it on both my iPhone and my iPad.

NPX Software specializes in mobile multi-media and makes audio and visual apps for the iOS platforms.  They’re based in the Netherlands.