Best Windows apps this week
One-hundred and thirty in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps and games released for Windows in the past seven days.
This week saw the release of several high profile apps for Windows, something that does not happen too often.
A-Montage for instance is an excellent application to create animated GIFs from videos, drawings or photos.
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.
The following applications and games are discounted by at least 50 percent this week.
- PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+, Pac-Man game for $4.99
- Roman Empire, a strategy game for $1.49
- Back to the Drawing Board, a 2D CAD and technical drawing app for $8.99
- Battlepillars, a real-time strategy game for $0.99
- BabyUp: Butterflies, a game for young children, for $0.99
- Mushroom Age, a puzzle game for $1.49
Best app of the week
A-Montage ($2.99, free trial available)
A-Montage is an animated GIF maker that supports the creation of animations from videos and photos or drawings.
As far as videos are concerned, you can load a source video from the local computer or select a YouTube video instead. All that is left then is to play the video and start the capturing process. The app displays the GIFs to you as a preview before you can save it to the local system.
You may use images, drawings and text instead to create animated GIFs. The process takes longer as you need to add each frame manually to the GIF.
Last but not least, A-Montage also allows you to create time-lapse videos.
Other apps
World Conqueror 3 ($0.99, no free trial)
The third part of the strategy game features 32 historical campaigns of the 20th century including World War II and the Cold War period.
The game features 50 countries that you can play as, almost 150 different military units, more than 200 famous generals with special skills, and technologies like nuclear weapons and missiles.
Battles are turn-based and you control movement and attacks of your units as well as new unit recruitment during turns.
This is a physics-based puzzle game in which you need to manipulate the environment to move candy into the mouth of a cute monster.
You rotate elements on the screen so that they deflect or guide the candy in a certain direction.
The game ships with a total of 40 levels that get harder with every level that you beat.
N7Player is a touch-optimized music application for Windows that you can use with the mouse as well.
It plays local music and displays artists in a tag cloud on start. First time you run the app it will download album art from the Internet.
The player supports major music formats including mp3, flac, mp4, wav, aac and ogg, Last.fm scrobbling and background playback.
One limitation is that it will only pick up music that is stored in the My Music folder on the system and not in other locations on it.
Under Heroes is an arcade game with strategy elements in which you control a team of three miners indirectly.
The miners have different tools at their disposal to remove different blocks in the game.
Mining drains stamina and once one miner is out of stamina, it is the end of the day and you have to start over on the next day.
You collect coins and gems while you are mining which you invest in upgrades, more stamina for instance, and buildings that provide you with bonuses and extra coins.
Mystery Dungeon Single HD ($0.99, free Lite version available)
Mystery Dungeon HD Lite is a rock-paper-scissors game at its core but adds different heroes and light RPG elements to the game.
You start the game with three heroes and can buy additional ones for in-game or premium currency in the store. Each hero has attributes such as health or attack power which improve when they level up and through equipment.
Heroes represent rock, paper or scissors in battle and you pick one hero that you want to play each turn. These representations change when you play heroes which means that you may end up with only one or two options but not all three.
The game features spells that your heroes can cast, boss enemies at the end of each level, and more to keep you entertained while playing.
Spaceship V is an action game in which you build and control your own spaceship.
You add weapon systems and body parts to your ship to fight threats and complete missions in the game.
Move your spaceship with the mouse, keyboard or by touch, upgrade it by collecting money, defeat asteroids to avoid being hit by them, and complete missions in the process.