It’s hard to believe that the man behind the glass-eyed animatronic freak show of Chuck E. Cheese is the same person who founded Atari, and that both these men are the same person who discovered that diamond-in-the-rough, Steve Jobs. But it’s true: Nolan Bushnell incarnates all of his men. And in his most recent book, Finding The Next Steve Jobs, Bushnell talks about his experience finding Steve.
Remember Lodsys, the patent troll that began suing a bunch of indie iOS developers back in 2011 over their use of in-app purchases? Well, it’s back to do more trolling. The company has targeted another ten mobile game makers in its latest complaints, which it has been quietly filing in an East Texas court throughout 2013.
The studios named include Gameloft, Walt Disney, BackFlip Studios, and Gamevil.
Gorgeous. Etsy shop owner Peter Morris has rejuvenated an old Atari 2600 by turning it into an iPhone speaker dock, replete with 6 equalizer settings, an FM radio and a 3.5mm input jack. It’s one of a kind, but if you get in quick, you can buy it for the pricy-but-still-tempting sum of about $230.
Kicking off this week’s list of must-have iOS games is Dreamcast classic Jet Set Radio, a terrific skating game in which you rollerblade around a fictional city and tag buildings, rival gang members, and more with spray paint. It’s accompanied by Pong World, the first official Pong game for iOS; a massive update to FIFA 13, and more.
It’s been 40 years since Atari released the first Pong game, and to celebrate the milestone, the company just released the first official Pong game for iOS. Called Pong World, the title delivers a new way to play the classic arcade game, in addition to a colorful new look and a whole host of new features.
Atari’s released a remake of its 1978 home console classic, Outlaw, which actually saw first life as a light gun game in arcades as early as 1976. Well, Flying Wisdom Studios has developed a new version for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad that looks a whole lot better than the original.
Released just last week, the new iOS version of Outlaw eschews the “pong-with-cowboys” style of gaming for a new art style that actually looks like, well, art. It’s still a 2D affair, with various denizens of the wild west sliding across the screen in a virtual shooting gallery.
In a laughable post over at LawPundit, Andis Kaulins makes an argument that Apple’s landmark $1 billion win against Samsung for patent infringement is at least partially bogus.
Why? Because Apple’s patent for bounce-back scrolling isn’t an original idea, but was, in fact, stolen from Pong, a game first released back in 1972. There are just a few problems with this idea…
Video games were about 50 times better when I was a kid than they are now. Maybe it was because we had to fill in the 8-bit graphics of Contra with our imaginations, rather than having all the gory beauty envisioned for us like in Modern Warfare 3. We’re big fans of iCade and their efforts to resurrect retro gaming, so when news hit today that they’re coming out with this cute little iOS controller called the iCade 8-Bitty, our news room collectively swooned over the contraption’s ambrosial charm.
You don’t hear all that much about Apple’s third founder, Ronald Wayne, and for good reason: he sold his stake in Apple just twelve days after the company was founded. It’d be worth $35 billion today. You might wonder what is going on in the head of a guy who made a blunder like that. Well, Wayne would like to tell you in his new autobiography, and… surprise… he doesn’t think he made a mistake at all!
Lodsys has gained plenty of fame (even infamy) in recent months for its continued pursuit of a number iOS and Android developers for their alleged infringement on patents that cover in-app purchases and upgrade links. Dissatisfied with its results so far, it now takes aim at some of the big names in gaming… but has Lodsys now bitten off more than it can chew?
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