Windows Phone 7 is a complete platform, now that Angry Birds is available for it.

If you have lived on another planet for a year and a half or so, Angry Birds is a physics game where you sling birds with your finger trying to take down green pigs who stole the birds’ eggs.
Yeah.

As you progress through the levels your skills are tested: aim and release the sling correctly, use the right bird for the right job and crumble the card castle that the pigs build to defend themselves.

Right after the initial introductory levels, the things get serious quickly: passing a level becomes a precision and tactics challenge (well, sometimes it’s just luck). If you are then going for all the achievements and try to get 3 stars in all stages, things become really hard – it will likely take tens of hours to get all the 3 stars achievements.

If you played it on other platforms you might want to replay and go for the Xbox Live Achievements and the friends leaderboard – show your friends how good you are at throwing birds!

Zombies are attacking your house! You defend your turf planting vegetables that can throw pea-bullets to the zombies taking them down as they advance on your lawn. You gather resources in terms of solar energy that either drops from the sky or is generated by sunflowers, then you can spend it to acquire more plants.

Different types of zombies and plants give a great variety to the game: attackers range from the plain undead to the pole vault jumper to the Michael Jackson zombie. A total of 26 types of zombies with different characteristics will attack and require adjustments in your defense tactics. Defenders range from peashooters to cherry bombs to potato mines. Use 49 perennial types to defend your doorstep: select the right tactic in every wave or zombies will soon knock on your door!

Everything is made with great humor and style: the art has an awesome ironic aura, the zombie animations, movements and explosions are simply hilarious. Even achievements and leaderboards have the ironic style of the game. PvZ has become so iconic that Pop Cap has received 41 offers for a movie made with its style.

Evernote will help you find your notes fast, it will index what you type and tag, of course, but it will also  do text recognition on the pictures and your handwritten notes.

You can tag the notes with geo-location, but we have not found this option in the Windows Phone version, maybe this will come in an upgrade with the Mango release that will allow app access to the compass and location later this year.

Your Windows Phone already comes equipped with One Note, which  has similar features. The notes need to be synched manually on OneNote, though – or a conflict arise requiring a PC for resolution. Evernote seems superior here. To balance, OneNote has the ability to pin Notes to the start screen that Evernote is missing, at least for now.

Another drawback is the missing formatting option that OneNote has and editing a note requires an additional tap that is less intuitive.

Technically the app is well integrated with Metro, but there are some technical issues reported: the 1.0 version of the app shows a blank screen at the beginning not telling the user that is synching with the server. This blank screen gave some bad reviews to the app, and it can be sending users off – be aware: to fix the issue just connect to a Wi-Fi connection and be patient for a few seconds until the first synch completes, you won’t regret it.

There are five tower types: Blaster (your typical cannon tower), Laser (goes through enemies, good to blast creeps in a row), Missile (area bomb), Shock (slows down creeps) and Vortex (builds up a large attack from dead creeps). Each tower can be upgraded up to seven times to get to their maximum power.

There is a lot of game to play here, enemies come in different variations and the levels are designed with a specific strategy in mind. You have to apply the right strategy to the variation of enemies and the level layout or you will soon lose the game and have to start over.

Remember: you will be challenged and fail. Multiple times. But then you will find the right strategy to beat the level and you will be gratified!!

For example: making a creep explode at the beginning of the track is worth only a x1 multiplier increase, the final stretch is worth x5, the zone close to your base x10 and a creep exploding by hitting your base is worth x20 (and you lose a life)!

To build up score you will have to use dangerous strategies, building your defenses to the end of the track rather than the usual beginning of the other tower defense games!

As every Xbox Live game on Windows Phone 7 there are Achievements and Leaderboards (friends only leaderboard though).

The only defect we found is that it’s hard to place the laser towers exactly where you want to, at least until you learn well the placement mechanism, which comes after playing a few games.

Ok, let’s try it.

Jump, jump, sproooooiiinnnggg, jump, sproooooiiinnnggg, …

Jump, jump, jump, crack, pheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew.

Game over.
Shoot! Gotta try again.

Jump, jump, jump…

…1 hour later…

Jump, jump, jump…

Jump, jump, jump (coudlhavebeenwrong, coudlhavebeenwrong), zip, zip, jump (coudlhavebeenwrong,) zip, zip, zip …

Jump, jump, jump…

Ok: the game is awesome. 5 stars. Get it. Now!

Yeah. Doodle Jump is that good.

It’s a simple game: tilt your phone to control the Doodler jumping on platform. Get as high as you can: miss one platform and you are dead doodle meat. Start over.

During your ascension, you will find platforms that break, disappear, move. Also weird alien beings (not that the Doodler is NOT already a weird being, huh) will be in your way, you can shoot them (tap on the screen) or jump on their head.

Simple but killer: gotta get higher. This is the Doodley Jumper secret, as you might already have experienced with Birdy Bounce on WP7.

As you climb you can see your previous heights as well as those of your friends to top. That is another element that will make you try again.

The level graphic theme can change: not all the iPhone/Android themes are available (we loved the Soccer theme on iPhone) but here there are more than enough for some variance: Plain, Snow, Night Ghosts, Jungle, Space.

Being an Xbox Live game, there are achievements and leaderboards. For some reason leaderboards are local or friends only, there is no global one (weird) and achievements seem to be hard (jump on 30 monsters in a game, really? On our best game so far we saw at most 10 monsters….)

Be warned: insanely addictive, this is the line on the iPhone marketplace. Well Doodle Jump is insanely addictive – just try it with the free trial and you will know.

This game is so popular that has even a community web site with suggestion on best hands and body positions for a higher score! (http://www.doodlejump.com/)

The simple concept and pure gameplay is so powerful that Doodle Jump is not only present on most phones today, but is also working on the big jump on the TV with Kinect: http://123kinect.com/doodle-jump-for-kinect/

The feature set is impressive: GPS tracking with over the top Map Navigation, Traffic and Public Transit overlay, roads, terrain and satellite views, gMaps has it all, and more.

Search results are ok but not great. The feedback on the app marketplace is mixed some users report better search results here others on Bing. Personally we found Bing superior. Entering the name of a school nearby Redmond, WA; gMaps returned a school in Scranton, PA (!). Also Bing auto complete is a great help as it return things before we even finish typing.

Overall gMaps is a clean and fast app that rivals the default Maps app that comes with Windows Phone 7; we think that the research of a place is still better on the Bing maps, but this might be subjective. gMaps is free and should not be missed in your collection – tap it with confidence, it has the BestWP7Apps seal of approval!

Whereas the original app only lets you jump backwards and forwards in 30 second increments, this one lets you drag your cursor to any part of the video. You can Like or Dislike a video inline, get links to related videos, toggle between High Quality and Normal Quality. You can even do all this while playing the video, as in portrait mode it only plays inside an inline-window. As soon as you turn the phone, voila’: full screen is served. While navigating, you can also search for videos, see the most viewed, and see your subscribed and favourite videos.

There appear to be more features than just what we’ve covered and the developer seems to be diligent in posting updates so we’ll leave the rest to the reader to discover.

There is also a version for sale, called LazyTube that supports HD Video streaming and sells for $0.99.

DX is the second version of Pac-Man Championship Edition. This variation has amazed the reviewers on the Xbox 360 Arcade version (IGN.com gave a perfect score of 10 out of 10 in their review) and is now available on Windows Phone 7 as the first mobile version (iPhone has the first CE edition). DX offers 3 different courses with 5 game modes for a total of 40 variations. Game modes include Score Attack (do as many points as possible in a limited time) Ghost Combo (how many ghosts in a row can you eat) and Time Trial (clear the maze as fast as possible).

Gameplay is simply top notch. As usual, you have to clear the appearing dots in sequence; once you clear a part of the maze from dots and fruit, new ghosts and pellets appear on the other side.

Ghosts are sleeping, if you get close they get angry and follow you. Line up a bunch of ghosts, eat the Power Pellet, turn around and eat lots of them in sequence with bangs, roars and flashes (satisfying!). If the ghosts get too close, the time slows down in a Max Payne-like effect, giving you time to react and avoid being killed by them; also now you have a bomb: pinch to deploy it.

Example of annoying menu 1: Start the game, the tutorial is available. Select the tutorial, do the tutorial. Game question: continue tutorial? Err…dunno…Yes? Tutorial restarts! (Darn, could they ask if we wanted to restart it rather than continue? )

Example of annoying menu 2: visuals selection: select Type A, B or C. Wait a minute: WHAT? A, B or C? Could they give them, like, a NAME?

Let us tell you there are some crazy scores in the level, how the heck did those guys manage to get such a high score? (we need to try harder!)

The game is much harder than you might think, at the intermediate levels, making sure that 7 out of 75 balls explode before the reaction dies out is a darn complicated task.

Damn! We missed it for just one ball once again!

Balls move at a different speed – color should indicate the speed, but we are not sure we can recognize them in the middle of another hundred of those flying all over the place.

On the improvements area, the presentation menu and game graphic are quite basics and could get a general better sense of design. Sounds are also lacking – only sound effect is a little monotone and get old easily (but you can get your music on and play for hours…)

[Video courtesy of Lynx Interactive]

Like Amazon and The Home Depot before, YP and Walgreens’ are also an example of how the standard Metro UI helps building an intuitive experience for users that can familiarize themselves with the basic controls and reuse the knowledge across multiple apps.

YP is the client for the familiar service, and has an interesting twist: consider this app as a mix of regular Yellow Pages search by business name, Yelp’s search by category with reviews and Groupon list of deals around you. The value of this app is in combining all these services.

Walgreens is more the regular app from the pharmacy chain that you would expect: find a store, what’s in the store, order pictures prints. Interesting twist here? The Refill by Scan option, which allows you to take a picture of the barcode on the drug box and order a refill.

Both apps mix Metro panels with the use of mobile web pages rendered by IE inside the app (Walgreens uses it more than YP). But overall this is not very apparent or really annoying.

Both apps are free on the Windows Phone 7 App Marketplace, and we believe they are worth your taps. Check them out.

Overall Pandas vs. Ninjas is a very good production – the folks at XIMAD have topped their quality bar [good job guys]. The gameplay is fun and it will get your slinging finger warm until the original hits the WP7 electronic shelves later this month.

The cards can have animals, numbers, letters or colors. You can play alone or in local multiplayer (full game only). Mazoocard has a free version as well as a $ 0.99 version.

Simon Cow and Mazoocard are amazing productions, the graphic is fantastic, the style extremely curated; we wish all WP7 games were made with such a dedication – great job!

Check out the videos below to get an idea of the quality of these games.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The app UI is well integrated with Metro but is a little sluggish and sometimes will catch a swipe for a hit making navigation a little hard.

You have most of the web site features available in this mobile version: the handy Discussion is available, showing you what questions other users had on the deal. Unfortunately you cannot ask questions via the phone, only read other people ones.

Overall this app is ok, a few improvements here and there will make it a great one – but what matters are the deals and Groupon have some scorching hot ones – go tap them now.