App Review: Baby Monkey (going backwards on a pig)

You have to approach Baby Monkey (going backwards on a pig) with your tongue firmly in your cheek. Based on the YouTube hit video and featuring the catchy can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head-no-matter-how-hard-you-try song by Parry Gripp, it weaves in plenty of other Gripp’s YouTube creations (like Nom Nom Hamsters and Space Unicorns). It’s cheesy and fully embraces its ridiculousness.

The real joke is the game isn’t a bad one. It’s a standard platform jumper and suffers from a lack of variety (you constantly have either the pig, monkey, or both jumping to grab bananas). The controls are a little complicated, though, and the game isn’t very forgiving of mistakes, yanking away the multiplier that boosts scores when you miss a single banana. And all the while, you’ll be listening to the semi-annoying, but catchier than it has any right to be Baby Monkey song, which you’ll carry with you long after you stop playing the game.

Read more at Common Sense

Constantin Films vs. the Internet

Stories about film studios that have had YouTube rip down videos featuring copyrighted works are a dime a dozen, but it’s not that often that you see the surfers of the Web unite in protest over it.

Constantin Films is in the middle of a PR disaster for just this reason, though. The German production company has asked the streaming video service to remove the hundreds of parody videos that used the climatic scene from its film “Downfall”.

Read more at Variety’s “Technotainment” blog