Gadget Review
The Appian Way: Movie Challenge
Rating 
Welcome to the first Appian Way, where we review the latest apps, covering both web-based and smart phone ones, including from the iTunes App Store. This week, we're kicking off with Movie Challenge, powered by The Inquizitor Engine.
Movie Challenge is an iPhone app that can be bought from the App Store for €1.59. It was developed by Conor Winders, CTO of Redwind Software Providers, www.redwindsoftware.com, and I'm delighted to kick off this regular section with an Irish company.
First off, there are plenty of movie trivia games out there for the iPhone, including Movie Trivia and Movie Quiz, but the first looks to be quite basic, while the latter is multiple-choice only.
Movie Challenge has lots of features, and the guys have obviously worked hard on producing a graphically strong application that fully takes advantage of the iPhone's touch interface and accelerometer.
When you start up the game, you can choose from easy, medium and hard level - I wussed out and went for easy - then you give your iPhone or iPod touch a shake and it shuffles to unlock a choice out of 10 possible categories, which include horror, action, directors and actresses.
Inside these categories, you get choices like trivia, jumble, quotes, order, what year (there are seven titles in total). This is good enough to keep you entertained because you're not answering the same old multiple-choice questions over and over again, and some involve dragging titles into an ordered list meaning you have to think on your feet.
I've only played this for half an hour or so, but it looks like you could go for hours with all the material in there. Also, I discovered that I am most definitely not a movie nut - I was on easy and was getting lots wrong!
One feature I did like about the game was the cheesy canned audio of the audience cheering when you got an answer right and the 'boos' when you didn't. It would be just as much fun to play this with your friends as on the bus or train journey home.
If you don't like the categories you've unlocked, you can always give your device a shake and go again, and there's even a statistics viewer that lets you see what categories are your strongest. Definitely worth the €1.59.
This game only works on iPod touchs and iPhones that have been upgraded to the 2.1 firmware, and also has an automatic game save function. When you run out of questions (there are 5,000 in total) there is an automatic, free update feature that downloads fresh ones.
By Marie Boran
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