2 must have WP7 applications for Christmas

I thought I'd quickly share with you a couple of the applications that I've installed my phone over the last weeks both are perfect companions for the festive period.

Santa Quest

Price: £1.99

Overview

Santa quest is a manic Miner style platform game by IronSun Studios. Whenever IronSun release a game I install it as I know its going to be well tested, wonderfully deigned and extremely addictive. This game is no let down, it has beautiful graphics, great gameplay and tons of levels.

From a developers point of view

Santa Quest is built using XNA, and has all the standard elements you’d expect to see in a platform game, Parallax scrolling,  a physics engine to handle the jumps, audio, sound effects and a really interesting on-screen Controller. It’s not terribly complex to build something like this yourself, but it does take a great deal of expertise to deliver something as well polished and responsive as Santa Quest. If you want to have a go at building a game like this then why not check out this sample project

Cocktail Flow

Price: £2.49

Overview

I’ve made about 3 cocktails using recipes from this application and they have all been good. The best feature is that you tell it what spirits, mixers and alcohol you have and it tells you what cocktails you can make. It also has a sweet little feature that tells you what other items you should buy to make more cocktails. It’s really handy, if like me, your trying to stock up your drinks cabinet before Christmas but don’t really know what to buy.

From a developers point of view

This application is built using Silverlight. If you want to know how to build applications like this then head on over to Gergely Orosz ‘s blog (The creator of cocktail flow) for the lowdown.