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If you’re a fan of base-building strategy games, there’s a good chance you’ve been playing Cloud Raiders on your mobile phones and tablets in the last few years — but you might not know that Cloud Raiders recently made the jump to the Mac App Store. We’ve been playing it on Mac, and as a geeky crew of gamers, we’re impressed.
Slime Rancher, the insanely fun first-person “slimer” from Monomi, is now 50 percent bigger with more slimes and game modes than ever before.
Currently on Steam’s Early Access for Mac and PC, Slime Rancher is a colorful, whimsical game that will capture your heart and game-playing time.
Check out the new trailer for the new Indigo Quarry update to this fun Mac game and see if it doesn’t make you go, “d’awww.”
Ready to get your adventure game on? Thimbleweed Park, coming later this year, could be your ticket to doing just that.
Back in 1987, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick created Maniac Mansion, the classic LucasArts adventure tale. Now they’re back with Thimbleweed Park, a charming indie adventure game that hopefully brings the genre into the modern world, leaving behind the random puzzles and dead ends of days past.
Check out the new trailer below to see what’s headed our way.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a game that looked as simultaneously adorable and mysterious as Paws, but here it is.
The upcoming title, which will drop on both Mac and PC March 24, puts you in the role of a sweet, lost lynx cub trying to find its way back home. And that sounds really sad, but the graphics in today’s announcement trailer are so charming that we could probably power through the pain.
Check it out below.
Mac games aren’t as numerous as iOS games, but they tend to be a bit more expensive, making impulse purchases a rare thing. How do you know which ones to spend your money on?
If you’re looking to stuff your stocking with the finest of games for our favorite platform, look no further. We play them all so you don’t have to, and we tell you which are the best ones to grab.
These are Cult of Mac’s picks for best new Mac games of 2015.
Indie favorite Shovel Knight is getting a new, free update based on a popular bad guy from the first release.
Called Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows, the new expansion will include a whole new way to play in the Shovel Knight universe with new levels, music, art, and platforming. The villainous Plague Knight, master of alchemy, is the star of this new addition, which will come along with the original game, Shovel Knight, and as a free update to owners of the original game, which won over 70 Game of the Year awards in 2014.
Check out the video below to see all the chaos of this action-packed expansion.
It’s a bit late in the game, but YouTube has the resources and brand-name cache to take on video game streaming juggernaut, Twitch, as it turns on the lights of its much anticipated game streaming service Wednesday.
YouTube Gaming is the new portal, separate from the Google-owned video giant’s regular video website, that will aim to capture the flags, hearts and minds of gaming’s streaming technorati, some of whom can make upwards of $8,000 per month just letting people watch them play video games.
Twitch is the 800-pound gorilla of the video game streaming world; in fact, YouTube tried to buy the service sometime before Amazon snapped it up. Will YouTube bring in both current customers as well as crushing Twitch in the process?
Even if this upcoming game from indie studio Heart Machine wasn’t already so hotly anticipated, I’d be caught up in its gorgeous art style.
Hyper Light Drifter seems to channel the 8- to 16-bit visual look of games like Sword & Sworcery while also connecting classic Legend of Zelda-type environmental puzzles and Diablo-style action RPG fun together in an awesome mashup that’s sure to get my attention and money when it releases next year.
Check out the second official trailer below for a better taste of what this game is promising.
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If you game on a Mac, or an iOS device, you’ve probably never played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. But that’s something that has now, quite miraculously, changed: After more than a decade, KOTOR 2 is finally available for Mac, and the game is (quite literally) better than it has ever been.
If you’re a gamer, odds are you have a perfect run, high score or really impressive combo that you list among the highlights of your “career.” Personally, I TKO’d Mike Tyson in Punch-Out!! when I was 10 or 12, and I did it when everyone else was out of the room. But I swear it happened, you guys.
Unless you have enough free time and determination to play one thing until you can beat it with your monitor turned off and your keyboard flipped around, however, your greatest moments can’t hope to compete with the four amazing speedruns shown in the videos below. These players have left “good” far behind them, passing through “really good,” across “crazy good” and over “suspiciously good” to enter a realm of pure skill in which merely beating a game is considered “a start.”
These people play a bunch of difficult titles pretty well, is what I’m getting at.
Luca Redwood, the main powerhouse indie developer behind EightyEight Games, has taken the last three years of his life to make a sequel to critical darling match-three game, 10000000.
Sadly, it’s not named 10000001, but rather You Must Build a Boat. In it, you actually do need to build a large, ark-like boat with all sorts of rooms and defenses and such, and you outfit your boat by running dungeons and matching items to kill baddies and get past obstacles in them.
Sound weird? It is, but it’s also going to be stupidly addictive. If it’s half as engaging as 10000000, you’ll be playing this on your Mac, iOS device, or Linux box long into the wee hours of the morning.
Check it out.
If you’re looking for new games to explode onto your Mac, look no further than these three “best of” gaming guides from one of the most Mac-centric gaming voices on the web, Mac Gamer HQ.
Featuring the 10 best strategy games, the 10 best first-person shooters, and (just published!) the 10 best MMORPGs — all only for Mac gamers — these three lists are bound to point you in the right direction, letting you set your sights on some amazing Mac gaming experiences without having to buy and try them all yourself.
Ah, Pong, the first video game I ever played! If you’re like me and feeling nostalgic for the retro-goodness of Pong, Pac-Man, or even Space Invaders, boy are you in luck.
Pacapong is a new free game that mashes up all three of these fantastic classic video games into one lovely multiplayer package that you can play on your Mac (or PC/Linux box) right now. How they all fit together is a mystery even the developer isn’t aware of.
“I’m actually not sure why,” developer Dick Poelen tells Cult of Mac, “but it started with adding Pac-Man and the maze to Pong. That seemed to make sense.”
Lat Ware is a pretty loquacious dude, without a bit of shyness in his persona. We came across Ware at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco the first week of March and tried out his upcoming game, Throw Trucks With Your Mind. He was strapping headsets onto conference attendees and keeping up a steady stream of patter to keep them off balance when trying to manage their character in-game.
You see, Throw Trucks With Your Mind uses an $80 headset from NeuroSky to actually read your brainwaves. Ware has set it up in the game to track opposite parameters: focus and relaxation. When you focus intensely, the onscreen red bar will fill up, allowing you to do things like jump, push, and toss heavy in-game objects. When you relax, a blue bar fills up and lets you do four other cool things for a total of eight different ways to interact with the game using your mind.
Try that while some chatty indie dev is all up in your ear, trying to distract you.
SAN FRANCISCO — When I went to meet Peter Dijkstra, the business guy at Dutch game developer Vogelsap, I had to wait in line to see the small, indie team’s new horror game, The Flock. I wasn’t too upset, though, as the guy in front of my was none other than famed Doom and Quake developer, John Romero.
Dijkstra’s The Flock is an upcoming horror multiplayer game that takes place in one of three different arenas. Playing the game with three other people Monday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco brought back memories of those long-ago sessions of Quake Arena, as well as more modern examples of asymmetric multiplayer like Left 4 Dead and Evolve.
République Remastered is the gorgeously rebooted Mac and PC version of Seattle-based Camoflaj’s intriguing episodic stealth video game that originally came out for iPad and iPhone in December of 2013.
The development team took the opportunity to completely revamp the game within the updated game engine, Unity, moving the entire project from Unity 4 to Unity 5. By making this the first game release ever with the Unity 5 engine, they got early access to the engine in return for documenting their process.
“When Unity 5 was announced we saw our chance to make good on our two-year old promise to make a PC and Mac version of République,” writes the team on the Unity blog. “In addition to spending months completely reworking the game’s controls and UI, we knew we’d benefit from an increased wow factor on this new platform. From our dumpy office in downtown Bellevue (surrounded by industry titans like Bungie and Valve), we’ve put our heart and soul into this ambitious and at times, difficult, project.”
Check out the official game trailer below to see how they succeeded in making this already stunning game even more gorgeous.
Yeah, you read that right – this is a video game where you play as a piece of bread on an epic journey to become an actual piece of toast.
I Am Bread has been out on Steam Early Access since December of last year, and now the developers at Bossa Studios have let it slip that the game will indeed come out on iOS, as soon as they finish up the PC/Mac version.
If you’ve seen the massively viral hit game Goat Simulator, you’ll immediately have a sense of how this one plays out. You’ll hit various keys on your keyboard or buttons on your controller, and move a slice of oddly movable bread around, trying to find some way to toast yourself. Here’s a quick video to visualize it.
Itching to take on the future techno-war depicted in the hyper-realistic Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise? Well, if you’ve finished off the original Modern Warfare game on your Mac, ported in 2011 by Aspyr, it’s time to lock and load your weapon of choice for the next two installments in the series, Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3.
These huge sequels are available now for the Mac platform, on Steam or porting publisher Aspyr’s own GameAgent distribution service. The new Mac versions of the game have all the downloadable content (DLC) packs from each game ready for your first-person shooter marathon.
Story-driven puzzle-adventure games are finding a new resurgence lately, with titles like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Fables finding critical success in the typically first-person shooter dominated games market.
Jane Jensen is the veteran game designer from the days of Sierra Online with massively popular games like King’s Quest and Gabriel Knight to her credit.
Developed by her new venture Pinkerton Road, funded via Kickstarter and published by Phoenix Online Studios, Moebius: Empire Rising is the first installment in a planned series revolving around Malachi Rector, a modern-day take on Sherlock Holmes with an attitude.
His bodyguard, David Walker, is a bad-joke loving ex-special forces badass with a heart of gold. It’s these two that form the central relationship in the game story, a nice break from the typical romantic love-interest interactions we see all too often.
Head on over to the Hyper Light Drifter Kickstarter page and you’ll immediately get a sense of just how hot this new bame from Heart Machine is going to be. With a modest goal of $25,000, the project garnered over $645,000 before it finished, and it looks to be well worth every pledge.
Just check out the moody, atmospheric video below, and you’ll see why we’re hyper-excited for this new indie adventure game.
It’s not that often that the Mac gamers out there get to download new content for a big title game like BioShock Infinite on the same day as their Windows-using brethren, but here it is.
Well-known Mac gaming company Aspyr has done just that, announcing on Wednesday that the latest and final episode of BioShock Infinite’s story-driven “Burial At Sea” module has just dropped on the Mac.
SAN FRANCISCO — We’re gearing up for our weeklong foray into the world of video games at the Game Developers Conference here. Cult of Mac will bring you the best of the conference, from heartfelt chats with independent developers to wacky schwag we find on the expo floor.
Stay tuned as we add real-time posts to this liveblog all week.
If you’ve been anxiously awaiting your turn to play Hearthstone, the new free-to-play digital card game from World of Warcraft developer Blizzard, now’s your chance. The fast-paced strategy game plays like a simplified yet strategically challenging Magic: The Gathering, and it’s available for your Mac immediately.
The game is free to download from the Hearthstone website, and will install easily and quickly to your Mac.
Once downloaded, you’ll hop in-game for a quick couple of tutorials, and then you can either play AI opponents to hone your skills and learn the various hero classes, or you can jump right in to playing other human beings via Blizzard’s Battle.net game matching service, one of the most robust around.
I’m a sucker for MMOs, and a huge fan of the Star Trek franchise. If you like both, you might want to know that a fantastic combination of these two great things is ready to play on your Macintosh.
Now you can get your Federation thrills on in Cryptic Studios’ Star Trek Online MMO. First launched for PC only in 2010, the game is now available as a free-to-play download on your Mac, letting the rest of us play this thrilling extension to the Roddenberry-created universe that first graced television sets back in the 1960s.
“Star Trek fans have been asking for Star Trek Online on Mac since we launched in 2010. Thanks to the tremendous success we’ve had with the game, we’re excited to be expanding the galaxy again.” said Cryptic Studios’ Stephen D’Angelo. “We know there’s a large gaming community that thrives on Mac and we’re thrilled to finally be able to let them experience Star Trek Online. It simply looks amazing on Mac widescreens.”
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified gets three new expansion packs for the Mac version of the game this week, available on the Mac App Store and Steam. The new packs–Hangar 6 R&D, CodeBreakers and the Light Plasma Pistol–bring new content and missions to the strategy title as in-app purchases.
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a tactical third-person shooter game set in the exciting XCOM universe, this time in the 1960s. You play as agent William Carter, helping your agency cover up and battle alien incursions on the planet.
