Jasmine Rea, author at Cult of Mac

Donate Money To Charity When You Play This Spooky Game [Review]

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Nightmare: Malaria is the story of a little girl with malaria. In her dreams, she is thrust into a horrible nightmare world where she is trying to save her teddy bears from a horrible world infested with malaria-carrying mosquitoes and vats of bubbling disease. Your goal is to guide her through the world and hide in screened tents to ward off the infected bugs.

Nightmare: Malaria by Psyop Games
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

You can download the game for free, but between each level you’ll see a prompt for a microtransaction. This won’t unlock features in the game, and you don’t need to contribute money to win, but the $3 purchase is actually a donation toward providing mosquito nets to people at risk for contracting malaria. You can donate as often as you want, and the whole game is designed to educate players on the dangers of the disease. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Against Malaria Foundation work tirelessly to help eradicate malaria, but your small contribution can provide preventative measures to people who can’t help themselves.

Yep, Angry Birds Go Sure Is A Kart Game [Review]

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The inevitable fate of all popular mascots to eventually end up in a go kart. Take a look at Mario, Crash Bandicoot, Sonic, and many other iconic video game mascot characters and you’ll find they’ve all squished themselves into a car at some point. Well, now the Angry Birds are, too.

Angry Birds Go by Rovio
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

Angry Birds Go is a free-to-play karting adventure full of repetition and cool-down meters. Unlocking aesthetically pleasing carts means putting in real money, and your spirited birdy racers get tired after a short while. Beyond that, Go is a completely average racer.

Star Trek: Trexels Is Cute But Disregards Series Continuity [Review]

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The first thing you’ll notice about Star Trek: Trexels (if you’re a massive nerd like me anyway) is that all the little pixel people are wearing Original Series uniforms while the overall game interface is the LCARS system from The Next Generation. A minor complaint, but it is a gripe I feel keeps Trexels from reaching its true potential.

Star Trek: Trexels by YesGnome
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $2.99

You play as a Starfleet admiral tasked with searching for the USS Valiant that disappeared in the currently unexplored Trexel system. The Valiant may have been destroyed but Starfleet doesn’t know for sure. So you hire a crew and send a barely constructed starship out to explore uncharted space. Nothing bad whatsoever could happen!

Hey Kids! Awesome Parties Have Consequences In House Cleaning [Review]

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If you wreck a house during a party,someone has to clean it up. House Cleaning has a kind of warped, hoarder-ish perspective on tidying up that will have your kids shoving all their misplaced mess into boxes. But it might encourage children to try to clean up after themselves if all other forms of parenting fail.

House Cleaning by Roger Dublin
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

After a totally awesome bash, the cutie cleaners in House Cleaning realize they can’t just leave books and CDs scattered throughout the garden of their friend’s home. So, you must dutifully help them sort out the garbage from the decent items before they can move onto another section of the post-party warzone. Plus, they’ll even do a bit of magical yard work when you’re done.

Tunnel Escape Is A Magic Carpet Ride Of Death [Review]

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When I saw Tunnel Escape in the App Store my first thought was that it looked a lot like the magic carpet sequence in the Super Nintendo version of Disney’s Aladdin (which is the best version, do not bring your Genesis fanboyism into this). What I wasn’t prepared for was it bringing back all the tension I felt as a kid trying to avoid swells of lava while soaring through increasingly narrow passages.

Tunnel Escape by Darryl Johnson
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

Tunnel Escape is decidedly much more relaxed than Aladdin as the only thing you’re fighting against is how long you tap the screen. Each tap raises the little cube higher in the world, and if you don’t tap, it’ll sink down on the bottom of the tunnel. Touching the walls, or top of the screen, means instant death, so you have to feather your taps to succeed.

Experience The Thrill Of Rock Star Micromanagement In Band Stars [Review]

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Now that you’ve played a game about making games to death (Game Dev Story)why not move on to conquer the world of Rock and Roll? Band Stars is another in the long line of simulation/micromanagement games that boils the creation process down to statistics and creativity points. The difference here is that you’re running a band rather than a company.

Band Stars by Halfbrick
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

If you’ve played any creation sim before, you’re likely familiar with Band Stars’ format. You start by creating your band from a basic set of characters then can hire more as you can afford them. Characters have unique stats that determine how useful they are in the recording process, and you can increase those stats through training.

Steam Punks Wants To Be Mega Man X Something Fierce [Review]

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Steam Punks likes Mega Man, and hopes you do too. Even the description of the game on the App Store says it was inspired from games like Mega Man X. And, boy, does Steam Punks play like a Mega Man game!

Steam Punks by Monster Robot Studios
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $2.99

You’ll jump, you’ll shoot, and you’ll take out curiously Capcom-like, steam-powered robots in your effort to save kidnapped scientist Professor Clout. You play as Dunns Callahan, an Elite Enforcer assigned to protect Clout. Clearly he doesn’t do a very good job of it as the Bowler Gang easily abducts the professor off a moving train.

Legend of Equip Pants Is Delightfully Self-Aware [Review]

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Legend of Equip Pants is an episodic adventure/role-playing game that revolved around the acquisition of pants. You play as Sir Pantsalot as he quests to find, well, pants to wear. You start out partially clothed in armor and generally terrorize the innocent populace with your lack of lower body covering.

Legend of Equip Pants by Zach Johnson
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

Each episode is fairly brief and has only a handful of solutions. In the first episode, you must acquire a costume or pumpkin pants to enter a party. You can either get a pumpkin and take it to the pantsmith or borrow cursed “underwere” that turn you into an underwerewolf! League of Epic Pants hardly takes itself seriously, and these bite-sized levels don’t overstay their welcome. You really only need a few minutes to appreciate the concept of underwerewolves, and the game’s developer realizes this.

Icycle: On Thin Ice Is A Cinematic Fever Dream [Review]

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Playing Icycle: On Thin Ice feels more like interacting with a movie than playing a game. You guide the hapless (and naked) Dennis through an increasingly treacherous frozen wasteland with nothing but a bicycle and a warm hat. The world will shift, crack, and crumble all around you, often sending Dennis up an ice flow or down into frozen lakes. The animation is so seamless that it’s almost like you’re watching a cutscene.

Icycle: On Thin Ice by Chillingo
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $0.99

What is more game-like about Icycle is the emphasis on completing level objectives while performing dangerous jumps to collect ice chunks. Doing so will let you unlock new tools and eventually clothing for Dennis to use. I was worried when I started the game that Dennis would just stay naked, so I’m glad you have the option to clothe him. Of course, every time you careen into spikey ice, his clothes miraculously disappear, leaving Dennis to freeze to death on the ice–which is as charmingly animated as everything else in Icycle.

Zone Out As You Lay Waste To Goblins In An Infinity Bravura Dash [Review]

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An Infinity Bravura Dash – Knights of the King is a very long name for a straight forward side-scrolling shooter. In I Bravura (the app store title for the game) you play as one of three knights that fire endlessly into an ever-flowing wave of slimes and goblins. One hit can kill you, so your goal is to take down as many baddies as you can while collecting potions and coins that fly toward you.

An Infinity Bravura Dash by Jessika Maria Jardim dos Santos
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: Free

Beyond walking right and shooting, there’s not a lot to I Bravura, but that isn’t a bad thing. Your character can walk forward and back a little, which makes it much easier to avoid enemies while diving for collectibles. The simplicity behind I Bravura makes it a very relaxing game to play. Once you gain enough gold and unlock the other knights, your objective is really just to make it as far as you can without dying. You can pick the game up any time and just slaughter enemies to your heart’s content.