One-hundred and fifty-six in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps and games released for Windows 8.x and Windows 10 in the past seven days.
No application of the week award this time unfortunately. Some good apps and games were released this week nevertheless. Check out Monster Buster: World Invasion, or Board Defender if you like strategy and puzzle games, or 22Tracks, Moodflow or Cast for some unique music apps and a great podcast manager.
Microsoft's 10 days of 10 cent deals is still running and the offers are really good, so check it out if you have not already.
As always, if I missed an app or game that has been released this week that you believe is particularly good, let me know in the comments below or notify me via email instead.
Discounts This Week
The promotion 10 days of $0.10 deals is in full swing bringing you loads of apps, games, music and videos for $0.10 each. It would take too long to list them all, but here is a short selection of discounted Windows apps and games that are available today (offers change daily).
- Halo Spartan Strike
- Hitman Go
- Package Tracker
- Reading Trainer
- CV Resume Builder
The selection of discounted music and movies is excellent as well. You can grab San Andreas, Marvel's The Avengers: The Age of Ultron or Mad Max Fury Road for $0.10 on the movie side for instance.
App of the week
None
Other apps
22 Tracks offers curated DJ playlists from Amsterdam, London, Paris and Brussels.
You can select a location and tune in to the top playlist, or pick a genre-specific playlist instead.
The app is free and new playlists are added to the application each month.
The free application adds options to Windows, mostly to the notification system, that may improve it for you.
For instance, it may use your geographical location to notify you about upcoming appointments in that region.
Other options allow you to set reminders based on locations, share your location with friends using Microsoft OneDrive, or disable Wi-Fi after 30 minutes of inactivity.
Board Defenders mixes elements of Chess with Tower Defense like features. The game plays on a Chess board but instead of having 16 pieces at your disposal, you only use a selection like the Queen or Rooks.
Your task in the game is to prevent your opponent's pawns from reaching the other end of the game board, and you do that by capturing all pawns before they reach that destination.
In addition, you need to pay attention to your own pieces as it is game over if a pawn manages to capture one of yours.
Board Defenders is a logic puzzle game as you will always have the same number of pieces at your disposal and pawns will always spawn at the same location.
Dark Note is a free note taking application for Windows. Add as many notes as you want to the app, select different fonts, colors and other customization options, and pin notes to the Windows Start Menu for direct reminders.
Notes can be shared and synchronized using OneDrive. Dark Note is not a new app, but it is quite popular and has not been mentioned here before.
Cast is a Podcast application that ships with everything a good podcast application should support.
It features an online search to make subscriptions easy, can synchronize your library across devices, and supports automatic downloads for offline listening and categorization.
Other useful features include deletion of episodes when they have been played, support for external storage, high-speed playback (1.5x or 2x) and playlists.
Take control of monsters in this fighting game and pit them against other monsters. Collect defeated monsters, each with unique stats and abilities, and gain experience to grow your monsters and compete against tougher opponents.
You start with a single monster and are thrown into your first fight right away. Each monster has access to three attacks that differ in availability, power and effects they may bring with them.
Some attacks may add a poison effect for instance, while others may improve your monster's defense temporarily or reduce the attacking power of the enemy.
A dexterity element is added to your attacks. Basically, it requires that you click at the right time to perform a perfect attack. The further away you are from that perfect moment, the less effective the attack will be.
Moodflow displays moods on start and asks you to pick one of them to play music matching it.
Music begins to play automatically once you have selected a mood like "euphoria", "in love" or "relax" until you close the application or pick a different mood from the list of available ones.
You can skip tunes, tag them, or add tracks to your favorites for direct access whenever you want to play them.
Notable updates
MyTube, a popular Youtube client features a new design for Windows 10 and a truckload of new features including playlist shuffling, faster subscribing to channels, comment sorting and more.
The official The Guardian application was updated. The new version fixes numerous bugs and crashes/hangs, and improves performance significantly.