Mixer, Microsoft’s new game streaming platform, has landed on iOS.
Formerly known as Beam, Mixer is taking on the likes of Twitch with live-streaming “that’s actually live” — not delayed. The iOS app lets you enjoy broadcasts in real-time, connect with your favorite streamers, and more.
What the deuce! Jam City just dropped a new Family Guy game for iOS, and if you’re a fan of puzzle games (or Family Guy), you should go download it now.
Another Freakin’ Mobile Game is an addictive matching game featuring 160 challenging levels and all your favorite characters from the show.
Twitch is planning to introduce new subscription tiers that will give fans the opportunity to donate more cash to their favorite streamers.
Starting later this month, you’ll be able to pay up to $24.99 a month, which could get you new benefits like exclusive emotes and subscriber roles.
Christmas is a great time to pick up cheap games for Mac and PC on Steam, with big discounts on the latest titles and timeless classics. According to a new leak, this year’s sale will kick off on Thursday, December 22.
With new iPhones, Apple Watches and the official launch of iOS 10, this was quite the week for fans of Apple’s mobile devices. But which apps were we feeling in the time between putting our new iPhone 7 through its paces or reporting on Tim Cook’s Good Morning America interview?
Check out our picks below.
Apple is giving the dedicated Game Center app the chop with iOS 10, so it’s up to games themselves to handle things like multiplayer invites and friend requests. However, they will get some support from the Messages app.
Nintendo fans bemoaned the company’s decision not to use Mario or Link or Donkey Kong in its first smartphone game, but it seems Miitomo is doing perfectly well without famous faces.
According to new estimates, the social app is currently raking in a whopping $280,000 every single week.
Mac users needn’t bother pre-ordering an Oculus Rift headset because they can’t use it. According to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, that’s because none of the machines Apple offers are powerful enough to meet its recommended specifications.
They’re not powerful enough to play the latest games at high-settings, either. Even if you spend thousands on a high-end Mac Pro, you’re going to be disappointed with its gaming prowess — especially if you want to drink in some of those sweet, sweet 4K graphics.
So, is it about time Apple built a Mac that’s good for gaming?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over this and more!
If you’re planning to grab Nintendo’s first smartphone game when it lands next month — or any of the others it has planned for 2016 — then it’s time to claim your Nintendo Account before someone takes the username you wanted.
Apple’s App Store policing is being called into question again after the company rejected a Cecil the Lion-inspired game in which animals turn guns on poachers.
Cecil’s Revenge features a safari truck of cheerful-looking wildlife firing at various caricatures of hunters, ranging from old-timey colonialists with rifles to cartoon Africans with guns.
If you’re a fan of strategy simulation games, you’ll probably already know the Anno series, which arrived on PC back in the heady days of 1998 and has continued as a successful franchise since then.
Developers Ubisoft recently announced that they will be bringing an original entry to the series to iPad, later this year. Called Anno: Build an Empire, you’ll begin by colonizing an uninhabited island, which you then harvest for resources, eventually building your way up to fully-fledged civilization — with various colonized islands under your control, which you can trade between.
Telltale Games has released the first in-game screenshots of its upcoming Borderlands spinoff, Tales from the Borderlands, and do they ever look pretty!
A mash-up of first-person shooter and adventure game, Cult of Mac last shared details on Tales from the Borderlands earlier this year, when we reported on an announced panel with its creators taking place at SXSW.
What is known about the game is that it takes place after the events of Borderlands 2, and also from the point of view of two characters: Hyperion employee Rhys and con-artist named Fiona.
Like other Telltale games it will be an episodic release, with individual episodes setting you back $4.99 each, or less if you choose to buy a season pass. How you act in individual episodes of the game will influence how the overarching story plays out, while loot collected in the game will also reportedly be available in “other areas of the Borderlands franchise.”
I think it’s safe to say that no one was clamoring for a Metal Slug tower defense game. Don’t get me wrong: I love Metal Slug and have since the Neo Geo days. But despite the number of entries in the series now being firmly in the double digits, I don’t think anyone was calling for a shake-up of the formula. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
With Metal Slug Defense, developers SNK Playmore have indeed “fixed it.” In some ways, this is no surprise. We live in an age where game franchises are constantly expanding into new genres: where Angry Birds aren’t content to simply be aggrieved avians in their original incarnation, but must also spread their wings into genres like kart racing and turn-based RPGs. But what’s more surprising about Metal Slug Defense is that, by changing the concept of the game, SNK haven’t “broke it” at all.
In fact, they’ve made something of a gem.
When I was about 11, my best friend was a guy called James Brzezicki, who used to spend hours drawing out super-detailed level designs for platform video games. I copied him, although mine were never as good.
The real problem, though, was that when the drawings were finished we had no way of turning them into actual games. Neither of us was able to code, and the idea that it might be possible to create a video game approaching the quality of, say, Super Mario World was pretty unimaginable stuff.
Thankfully, technology has moved on a lot in the past couple of decades. Proof of this is the launch of a new iPad app called Pixel Press Floors, which lets you create side-scrolling platform games using nothing more than a few basic school supplies.
Since the glory days of Neo-Geo, I’ve been a massive fan of Metal Slug: the run and gun series of video games that sees you blast the living heck out of everything from enemy soldiers to undead zombies and giant crab monsters.
Now a new iOS game set in the Metal Slug universe, called Metal Slug Defense, has been released — and it actually looks pretty good.
Unlike recent abominations like RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile, which are the nostalgic equivalent of being forced to burn your favorite childhood toy while your first girlfriend points and laughs at you, this game has taken the superb pixel art, animations and manic destruction that fans loved about the Metal Slug series and turned it into an entertaining iPhone experience.
Okay, so pinball maybe isn’t the first thing you think of when hear the two words Star Wars, but this actually looks pretty great.
Developers Zen Studios are veritable Jedi masters at bringing out both the video game quality you need in a digital pinball table, and also at utilizing licenses in a way that doesn’t feel money-grubbing and superficial.
Full disclosure up front: I was a huge fan of the Sonic series back in the day. As a result, sitting down to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 I was of two minds: one part of me happy to be replaying a game I had enjoyed so much in childhood; the other part worried that this would be a lazy cash-in on the part of Sega.
Was I right to be concerned? Yes, is the short answer. Ever since the late 1990s, Sonic games have been the model of inconsistency: good efforts at reviving Sega’s flagship character quickly brought back down to earth by frankly shocking attempts at new installments.
I didn’t play the first stab at bringing Sonic 2 to iOS, but reportedly it was pretty uninspiring stuff — featuring sound problems, rubbish virtual controls, a windowed play area and (perhaps worst of all for our speedy hedgehog friend) slowdown issues.
So how has the game fared this time for the re-release?
Anyone whose iOS device is missing a certain speedy blue hedgehog can rejoice this week, thanks to a new sale that has seen Sega drop the price of several of its Sonic iOS games.
Currently both Sonic The Hedgehog and Sonic The Hedgehog 2 can be picked up for just 99¢ each (down from their normal price of $2.99), while Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is now available for free.
Frogmind’s excellent Badland has just been updated — adding ten new levels to what was already a fantastic game.
For those who haven’t played it before, Badland is well worth downloading. It’s a flapping game, but one that will cleanse your palate of the sour (if slightly addictive) taste of Flappy Bird, thanks to its gorgeous graphics and well-designed level layouts.
DC Comics comic game, Injustice: Gods Among Us, will be getting a new mobile multiplayer mode and tons of new characters, according to reports coming out of WonderCon.
Developed by NetherRealm and published by Warner Brothers, the fighting game is one of a very select few that gets it right on touch-based devices — faithfully translating the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 console game to Apple’s mobile operating system.
Until now, however, playing the game on iOS has been a solitary experience. That looks like it will be rectified in a future game update, as a video from DC All Access reveals a multiplayer mode in the works.
If there are two things you’re likely to hear from Monument Valley players it’s this: “Wow, what an incredibly original game” and “That didn’t take long to complete.”
Both statements are totally factual. Ustwo’s puzzle game masterpiece is one of the most original games of the year, but also an experience that flies by all too quickly.
With that in mind, the developers have confirmed that they are, in fact, working on extra levels to bolster the game.
But they’re not just doing this for the sake of doing it. According to Neil McFarland, ustwo’s director of games:
One more way that Apple is challenging Google is by pushing for exclusive games on iOS, claims a new report.
The Wall Street Journal reports that as Android’s influence has grown, Apple has been offering games developers promotional perks — such as premium placement on their app store home pages — in exchange for first rights to particular titles.
Last August, Apple struck a deal with EA to receive a two-month exclusivity window for Plants vs. Zombies 2, which did not arrive on Android until November.
A similar deal saw the popular sequel to ZeptoLab’s puzzle game Cut the Rope arrive on iOS in December — but not make it to Android until late March this year.
Despite being Cult of Mac’s resident comic book fan, I’ll admit that I was apprehensive about Gameloft’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
A movie tie-in (strike one), based on a sequel to a totally uninspiring reboot (strike two), and developed by a team who haven’t always had the best reputation for turning out quality products (strike three) — those three facts combined meant that my spider-sense regarding which games to be excited about, shouldn’t have exactly been ringing at the prospect of this title.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the sequel to (believe it or not!) Gameloft’s 2012 The Amazing Spider-Man. That game was actually better than many expected, however, and from the looks of the sequel’s teaser trailer, the developers have been hard at work to make this a stronger follow-up.
So is it as “Amazing” as the title would have you believe?
Move over FarmVille, Candy Crush and all those other freemium games whose developers (presumably) sleep on top of a pile of money with beautiful ladies in it — we may have a new contender for app overlord of 2014.
Blizzard’s turn-based iPad game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft was released Thursday, but already it’s the No. 1 most downloaded game in 36 countries, and the most downloaded app overall in 34 countries.
One of the cool things about the era of over-the-air updates is that developers can add tweaks and features specific to certain times of the year, without having to build them in from the start.
That’s what EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out iOS game has done for Easter, adding in features specific to this time of year as a way of giving a seasonal nod to Simpsons’ fans. In the same way that the game was overrun with snakes for Whacking Day, so too for Easter has Springfield been overtaken by bloodthirsty bunnies, which players must stun into submission.
