Video games are often praised right out of the gate due to their amazing graphical fidelity and smooth animation. A less visible but equally important feature of any game, especially in the realm of first-person shooters, is the control scheme.
DeNA / Mobage’s The Drowning, out today as a universal iOS app, has seemingly nailed both of these things in a game that’s taking the iOS gaming world by storm. And perhaps shotgun.
The developer behind incredibly successful free to play iOS game, Puzzles & Dragons, is back with a new free to play title called Freak Tower.
Launching the game for the first time allows prospective tower builders to walk through a tutorial that gives a decent overview of the game. The idea here is to build a tower, one floor up at a time, and fight off various monsters that climb said tower to steal the food that’s dubiously placed on the roof.
Bad Piggies, the super popular puzzle game from Rovio, has gone free for the first time since it hit the App Store last September. It’s thought to be thanks to the App Store’s App of the Week promotion, so you have seven days to download the game before its price goes back up.
This frantic, wacky 2D endless runner from Illinois-based development studio High Voltage Games (Zoombies, The Conduit HD) has just been chosen as the iTunes App Store’s Free App of the Week. To celebrate, Le Vamp is now completely free to download and try out for the next few days.
Hurry, though, the special offer only lasts through August 1 at 11 pm Central US time.
Screenshots are the life blood of this tips column, and I’m willing to bet a lot of you use the feature, built right in to your Mac, to capture images of stuff on your screen to share with friends, family, co-workers, and so on. It’s super simple to use; just hit Command-Shift-3 to take a picture of the whole screen, or Command-Shift-4 to just select a portion of it.
Any challenger to this ease of use is going to have to have something a little extra. Share Bucket may just be that app. Not only can it take screenshots of portions of your screen, but it can annotate those screenshots with circles, arrows, and blurs (for confidential info). Better yet, it connects to not one, but three different cloud services: Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.
As the App Store’s fifth anniversary approaches, a whole host of developers have begun makes some of their most popular apps and games for iOS completely free. Some of the titles included in the sale are Infinity Blade II, Disney’s Where’s My Water?, and Traktor DJ, which is usually priced at $20.
You knew there’d have to be a Lone Ranger iOS game, and it’s up now at the App Store, just in time for the release of the movie starring Johnny Depp.
Best Buy has today begun a new nine-day deal that gives you $150 when you trade-in any working iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S. That’s enough to cover the cost of a brand new 16GB iPhone 5 on a two-year contract with a $50 instant rebate, which means there couldn’t be a better time to upgrade.
After being pulled from the App Store back in April for violating Apple’s latest guidelines, AppGratis has turned to Android to keep its app recommendation service alive. The company has this week launched a new app in Google Play that promises a free app every day, plus discounts of up to 90% on paid Android titles.
Gameloft has made Gangstar Rio: City of Saints and N.O.V.A. 3, two of its high-end mobile games, free for a limited time on iOS. Both titles are universal releases that can be played on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and they’re usually priced at $4.99 and $6.99 respectively — saving you $11.98.
Do you present a lot? Maybe PowerPoint or Keynote presentations in front of lots of busy professionals? Have you ever had that nightmare where you get to your hotel and realize that you forgot to make the presentation you give the next morning? Yeah, me neither.
However, if I did wake up to that horrifying reality, I’d grab Stitch, an iPhone app that lets you make video presentations using your own pictures and text in minutes, right from your iPhone. Here’s how.
Dropbox is a great service, and I use it both professionally and personally. I share files with friends, presentations and documents with co-workers, and I upload my iPhone photos as well as a secondary backup to PhotoStream, which can be touchy at times. Problem is, I need to ask people if they’re Dropbox users, get the email they’ve associated with the service, then log in to Drobpox and create a shared folder with that person’s email. It’s useful, and not too difficult, but it can be tedious.
That’s where ProxToMe comes in. This free app does all the discovery for you, letting you share any file from your Dropbox account with any other ProxToMe user nearby. Slick!
Spotify is one of the best music services available now and practically negates the need to ever buy music from iTunes. Being able to stream almost any song to your iPhone whenever you want is a dream for most people; the only problem is you have to pay a monthly fee for the app to work.
A new report claims that Spotify is trying to change all that by renegotiating deals with record companies so that you can get Spotify on your iPhone for free.
There are many times you might want to knock out the background of a particular image on your Mac. Typically, I pop into Photoshop or Fireworks to use the Magic Wand tool to select all the white space of that image, and delete from there. These programs cost hundreds of dollars, though. Isn’t there a free way to do this?
It turns out that Preview, the free image & PDF viewing (and now editing) app that comes with OS X will do the very same thing, without you having to spend an extra dime on image editing software. Here’s how to do it.
Moves is that rare thing on the modern App Store — a free app that has an enormous amount to offer. It’s magical in its simplicity, an app that asks no more than you switch it on and forget about it.
All you have to do is carry on with life. Moves tracks your movements, intelligently works out whether you’ve been walking, running, cycling or using transport of some kind, and provides you with a helpful summary at the end of each and every day.
Best of all, though, it does so without any need for input from you. You don’t have to tell it that you’re going out for a run. You don’t have to tell it you’re walking from A to B.
It just knows.
Infinity Blade, the spectacular sword slinger from Epic Games studio ChAIR Entertainment, has gone free for the first time since making its App Store debut back in December 2010. The title, which is available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, has been chosen by Apple as its free App of the Week.
We say this often here at Cult of Mac: “This new whatsagizbob will change your life!” Perhaps we say it too often. But I can think of very, very few things I’ve seen where the phrase would ring as true as it does with Rabbit.
Rabbit is a videochat app and platform for Mac unlike anything you’ve seen, designed for immersive video socializing in groups, created by four ex-videogame developers, with mind-boggling attention to detail. You can even screencast movies, and share images and webpages over Rabbit.
And today, it’s been released as a closed beta (but read on to find out how to get your hands on a copy).
Hands up if you remember Dial-a-song. You don’t? Man, those were the good days. Even if you don’t remember them, now’s the time to re-live them on your iPhone. Like it’s an old phone. A dial-a-song phone.
While we’ve been looking at various new ways to interact with sheet music on the iPad at the 2013 NAMM show this week, here’s an app that takes sheet music and brings an entire orchestra along for the ride.
You can take this free iPad app out for a spin and it will turn the page for you as well as let you play along with Piano, Cello, Violin, Viola, Guitar, Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, Recorder, Clarinet, Trumpet, Saxophone, Horn, or Voice. Calling this “augmented sheet music,” the app brings the same service from the Weezic website to your iPad in a native app.
Vine is a new, free toy from Twitter. It replaces text with video, but only six seconds of it at a time, shot instant-by-instant. And it’s much cooler than I expected it to be.
Regularly $0.99, Screen-Recorder is available now for free on the Mac App Store, letting you capture video of your Mac’s screen for no money at all.
Version 3 came out in January of last year, while the original app was released in May of 2011. The latest update brings some minor bug fixes to the table, along with the price drop to free.
This is not Pacman. No. It looks like Pacman, it sounds like Pacman. But it’s called Not Pacman for a reason: it’s not Pacman.
How does it play?
Like Pacman. A bit.
Pangolin is a cute little puzzle-platformer for iOS that might either drive you mad with rage or mad to the point of insanity. Or both. It’s tricky, challenging, and offers plenty of repeat play opportunities.
If you’ve been around on the internet for any length of time, you’ll have probably heard about a site called Xtranormal, which converts text you enter into a simple little video starring cute animal characters. (If you haven’t heard of it, go and have a play there now, it’s fun.)
Tellagami is a new free iOS app that does something similar. I say “similar”, but the two are not in the same league. Tellagami is very simple, and its features limited. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it, though.
Move over, Mojang! The Blockheads, inspired by such open-world exploration games as Mojang’s certified hit, Minecraft, is the best implementation of the genre yet, out Minecrafting even the official Minecraft game released for iOS some time ago.
You start the game as either a single or 2 player experience. The two player game promises online multiplayer with voice chat via Game Center, while the single player is what I’ve spent my afternoon messing with on both my iPhone and iPad mini. It’s seriously sticky, with all the kinds of things that made me sink hundreds of hours into the Mac version of Minecraft a couple of years ago. There’s crafting and mining, day and night cycles, sleep, a huge open world to explore, and more.