It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire” at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]
Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]
New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.
Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]
Full category list for displayed posts: Gaming, mac
1:35 pm, November 20th, 2009, Cate Defrise
Happy Friday! Mac Games and More has again picked out a collection of casual games you might not have heard of, to play into the weekend. Games include a hack and slash fighting elves, a logic puzzle mining for treasure, an addictive arcade classic and more.
Posted by Cate Defrise in Gaming, mac | No Comments »
8:49 pm, November 19th, 2009, Eli Milchman
This is what you’re about to ask: Is Star Wars: Trench Run so good that it’ll have you wondering how magically your iPhone becomes an X-wing fighter? Answer: No. It’s better — it’s actually so good, you’ll be trying to figure out why your X-wing looks suspiciously like an iPhone.
Posted by Eli Milchman in Gaming, Reviews, iPhone, iPhone Apps, iPod Touch | 5 Comments »
6:42 am, November 18th, 2009, Giles Turnbull
Russell Davies does lots of things that are interesting, including, um, Interesting and Newspaper Club and a bunch of other stuff, but the other week he did a talk at the Playful event in London, culminating in this fabulous mock-up of an augmented reality game using an iPhone.
The idea is genius: you start playing the game with one tap, and after that you don’t have to look at the device at all. You walk around with your earphones in, and it alerts you with sounds when there’s stuff to interact with. This video explains it better:
SAP from russelldavies on Vimeo.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in Gaming, News, Top stories, iPhone | 2 Comments »
2:05 pm, November 13th, 2009, Cate Defrise
It’s that time again! Mac Games and More has picked out a collection of casual games you might not have heard of, to take you into the weekend. Games include stones to put you in a Zen state, gardens that do not get your fingernails dirty, scandals involving murder, bribes, movies and more.
Posted by Cate Defrise in Gaming, mac | 6 Comments »
3:16 pm, November 6th, 2009, Cate Defrise
This week’s picks from Mac Games and More is a collection of various games you might not have heard of, to take you into the weekend. Included in the selection: a road trip across the U.S. playing 9-Ball, swashbuckling musketeers duking it out in 17th century France, a county fair empire ruled by you and more.
Posted by Cate Defrise in Gaming, mac | 1 Comment »
9:45 pm, November 3rd, 2009, Lonnie Lazar
Security software developers must think Mac users are quite daft. Tuesday afternon Symantec sent out a press release flogging its ‘discovery’ of a new trojan horse targeting Apple’s OS disguised as a ’space invaders’ style video game in which killing invading aliens results in the program deleting files from the user’s hard drive.
Ooo.
The game in question is an art project called Lose/Lose that first appeared on the web back in September, created by digital artist Zach Gage and featured in Electrofringe’s current exhibition of online art, Electro Online 2009.
The idea behind the project is to use game mechanics to call into question the idea of mindless killing for fun. Are gamers so obsessive they must kill aliens at any cost? In the game, each alien is based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted.
Gage asks, “Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?”
The game has a clear warning at start-up that says, in scary red letters: killing aliens in this game will delete files from your hard drive.
Now Symantec is sending out an alert flagging the art project as malware.
“A new threat cleverly disguised as a classic video game is targeting unsuspecting Mac users,” Symantec said in an email to CultofMac.com. It continued:
The Trojan horse, known as Trojan.Loosemaque, is designed to look like a Space Invaders/Galaga style game. However, for every alien ship the user destroys, the program deletes a file from the home directory. Symantec – the world leader in online security – recently discovered this new Trojan horse targeting Mac users and video of it in action can be seen here. Online games are increasingly becoming a target for virus creators, and this threat shows it’s a possibility regardless of the platform. While the author of OSX.Loosemaque actually informs people on his website that the game deletes files, there’s nothing stopping someone with more malicious intentions from modifying it and passing it on to unsuspecting users who don’t have security software installed.
Symantec is not the first company to flag Gage’s project. Security blockers such as Sophos’ Anti-Virus and Intego’s VirusBarrier X5 also define the game as a threat.
So is it art or is it malware? Are Mac users equipped to know the difference? Seriously, what do security software companies take us for?
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Gaming, Macintosh, News | 16 Comments »
2:47 pm, October 30th, 2009, Cate Defrise
Boo! Here’s Part 2 of Fun Mac Games for Halloween! This week’s selection from Mac Games and More includes more Halloween inspired games you can play into the weekend. Get ready to scream because in the games you’ll find a seriously spooky psycho, yourself trying to escape a mysterious island, the devil himself settling a score with evil robots and more. If you missed the ghoulish games last week, click here for Part 1.
Posted by Cate Defrise in Gaming, mac | 3 Comments »
1:00 pm, October 23rd, 2009, Cate Defrise
This week’s selection from Mac Games and More include Halloween inspired games that will take you into the weekend. In the picks you’ll find a zombie invasion with ensuing battle, sweet treats that won’t give you any cavities, good ole fun whacking some light-hearted zombies and more. Be sure to check back here next Friday for Part II.
Posted by Cate Defrise in Gaming, mac | 2 Comments »
1:47 pm, October 16th, 2009, Cate Defrise
Here’s this week’s selection of games from Mac Games and More that will take you into the weekend. The picks include collecting ancient artifacts in the heart of Egypt, an animated, side-scrolling shooter in claymation, cavorting with Sherlock Holmes and more.
Posted by Cate Defrise in Gaming, mac | 2 Comments »
9:52 am, October 12th, 2009, Craig Grannell
Canabalt's detailed pixellated graphics (zoomed here) draw you into the game.
With its simple tap-to-jump gameplay, high-speed scrolling and gritty dystopian atmospherics, Canabalt proved a hit Flash-based sensation when recently unleashed online. The game has now been released for iPhone and iPod touch—one of the first truly successful Flash-based games on the platform. We spoke to Adam Saltsman and Eric Johnson of Semi Secret Software about how the game came to be.
Read the rest of this post »
Posted by Craig Grannell in Gaming, Interviews, News, iPhone Apps | 2 Comments »
12:24 pm, October 9th, 2009, Cate Defrise
Here’s this week’s selection of games from Mac Games and More that will take you into the weekend. The picks include a lego-like construction puzzle using goo balls instead of lego pieces, a side-scrolling shooter to take down all of your enemies, a kickin’ top-down perspective soccer game and more.
Posted by Cate Defrise in Gaming, mac | 1 Comment »
6:56 pm, October 6th, 2009, Craig Grannell
Edge is back! Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Earlier this year, we ran several articles about Mobigame’s excellent iPod game Edge getting a legal smackdown from Tim Langdell, owner of Edge Games. Over time, his claims to the Edge marks have, according to commentators, become increasingly dubious and troll-like, to the point where internet sleuths have clubbed together as ChaosEdge to provide a legal fund for Mobigame and information repository that built on the investigative work of TIG Source.
Recently, EA filed suit against Langdell about an entirely different Edge trademark spat, but, to aid indie devs, EA aims via the suit to obliterate all Langdell’s Edge marks, making the world safe for people to use the word ‘Edge’ in the title of a videogame without someone who had a company that was marginally famous in the 1980s popping up and having a major hissy fit.
Possible upshot? Edge is back in the App Store ($4.99 US/£2.99 UK). Somewhat like what you’d get if Marble Madness was built from cubes, and then a load of other cracking gameplay components were added, Edge is a top game for iPod touch and iPhone. And while we hope it’s around for good this time, we strongly recommend you go and buy it right now, just in case it vanishes again.
Posted by Craig Grannell in Gaming, News, iPhone Apps | 2 Comments »
1:27 pm, October 2nd, 2009, Cate Defrise
Here’s this week’s selection of games from Mac Games and More that will take you into the weekend. The picks include an addictive pachinko-like game, a DIY aquarium sim mixed with hidden objects, and an action-packed genetically modified shoot ‘em up.
Posted by Cate Defrise in Gaming, Macintosh, mac | 2 Comments »
3:00 pm, September 29th, 2009, Craig Grannell
Frotz: text adventure goodness on your iPod touch or iPhone
These games were primarily text-based, with you solving puzzles via verb-noun parsers. As time went on, adventures gradually became increasingly complex and elaborate, with Infocom arguably leading the genre to its height.
Sadly and perhaps predictably, text adventures eventually got a thorough kicking. In the words of Richard Harris: “Graphics came along and the computer-using portion of the human race forgot all about 500,000 years of language evolution and went straight back to the electronic equivalent of banging rocks together—the point ’n’ click game,” which, he argues, signalled the arrival of the post-literate society.
But via the magic of the internet, interactive fiction clings on, and apps for playing the Z-machine format are commonplace. Frotz is one of the best, and it now exists as a free iPod app. I interviewed its developer, Craig Smith, to find out what he thinks of interactive fiction and why he brought Frotz to Apple handhelds.
Posted by Craig Grannell in Gaming, News, iPhone Apps | 7 Comments »
12:20 pm, September 25th, 2009, Cate Defrise
Here’s your selection of games from Mac Games and More that will take you into the weekend. The picks include a platformer where you’ll happily rescue your girlfriend from aliens, a fast-blasting, cannonball shooting pirate game and a sim where you take on the role of an all powerful deity.
Posted by Cate Defrise in Gaming, mac | No Comments »
Ninja Assassin the movie is an anticipated Hollywood swords and sandals epic from James McTeigue, director of V for Vendetta, with a story from J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 and the only Spider-Man comic in which Dr. Doom cries (though the artist allegedly came up with that last bit).
It’s also now an [...]
This is what you’re about to ask: Is Star Wars: Trench Run so good that it’ll have you wondering how magically your iPhone becomes an X-wing fighter? Answer: No. It’s better — it’s actually so good, you’ll be trying to figure out why your X-wing looks suspiciously like an iPhone.
New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.
Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]
If you jailbreak your iPhone, the first thing you ABSOLUTELY MUST DO is change the default filesystem password.
When you jailbreak, the filesystem’s password is set to the common password “alpine.” As people usually don’t bother changing this password after performing a jailbreak, it’s really easy for hackers to get access to any jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch [...]
Convert your mild-mannered Mac Pro into a hard drive speed demon. Stuff it with drives fast enough to work with full-quality, uncompressed video. Get more than 300 MB/s on your internal drives! It’s so easy even I can do it!
I’ve been working in video production for the last 20+ years. When you’re working with video [...]
Some readers might remember the fuss a few weeks ago, when Snow Leopard came out and people noticed that it did something screwy to the way files behave.
George Hotz a.k.a GeoHot has released blackra1n RC3, which is an update to a 1-click jailbreak that adds activation options and an add-on blacksn0w, which unlocks latest iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS baseband version 05.11.07. To use blacksn0w, make sure you have this new baseband (check under Settings –> General –> About –> Modem Firmware) [...]
