In April's selection of the best iOS apps, we've got a brand new social experiment from Nintendo, an extremely useful dashboard cam and even a morbidly fascinating death clock! How many 'cat lifetimes' do you have left to live? Find out all this and more below!
When Nintendo annou
nced they were creating apps for mobile, I – and most of the world – rejoiced that we’d finally be able to play Super Mario or Legend of Zelda on our iPhones. Sadly, this turned out not to be the case: Instead, Nintendo announced Miitomo, a peculiar-sounding social network/messaging platform. Nintendo fans everywhere were simultaneously confused, disappointed and intrigued. But the app is here, what can we make of it?
Well, when you first launch the app you are invited to create a 'Mii' (or, optionally, import one from a console). For those unsure of what this is, a Mii is a digital representation of yourself, which lives inside the Miitomo world.
One of Nintendo’s aims with this social app is for people to get to know each other better, and one of the app's main activities is answering questions about yourself. These answers will be shared with your Miitomo friends, so they can learn more about you as a person, just as you can learn more about them by reading their answers.
Honestly, it’s more than a little bizarre! As an adult in his mid-twenties I don’t really get the appeal – although plenty of my colleagues are already obsessed with sending each other Miitomoselfies, and I could certainly see my younger teenage sister getting a lot out of it. Questions such as “What would you do if you and *friend* both fancied the same girl?” is something I imagine schoolkids think about much more than I ever do – although it does leave lots of room for humour in your replies!
The real gem of weirdness here is the Miitomo Photos feature. This lets you create pictures of your Mii, and because you can use any photo as a backdrop, you can have some hilariously good fun with it – which of course the internet has already done in mostly funny, and sometimes cruelly hilarious, ways.
I would fully recommend spending some time looking through the #miifoto feed on Twitter, as some of the creations people have come up with are fantastic – and will give you some great inspiration for making your own Miifotos.
I probably will continue using Miitomo for a while as it is just weirdly fun. The app is bursting with Japanese culture and full of cutesy character actions. If this isn’t your thing, then you may want to pass – but if you're looking for a whole new way to socialise with your friends, I highly recommend you give it a try!
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