games - page 34

LOS ANGELES — Free-to-play games don’t enjoy the same cache as games that cost money right out of the gate. Sure, they’re at the top of the “making money” charts, as gamers download freebies by the bucketful (and apparently purchase loads of virtual stuff from them), but ask any gamer what they think of them and they’ll typically give you a blank, slightly annoyed stare.

So I honestly didn’t hold out much hope that I’d see anything super-interesting at an Electronic Entertainment Expo luncheon sponsored by free-to-play mobile game maker DeNA last week.

However, the developer showed off a couple of pretty damn good games at the event. We saw the recently released Transformers tie-in game and several others, including Peter Molyneux’s latest effort, Godus. But what really stuck out for me were Royal Defenders and WARP.

I’m a massive fan of SNK’s King of Fighters franchise, to the point that I own a 4 CD compilation of the series’ soundtracks over the course of its lifetime. Which is why I’m incredibly happy to hear that SNK Playmore is working on a rhythm game based on the King of Fighters fighting game franchise “packed with legendary SNK tracks!”

We’ve written a lot about how there’s no shortage of great games in the App Store, and just to gobble up even more of your time this summer, Electronic Arts has just staged a massive sale on some of its most popular titles — discounting them by as much as 90 percent in some cases.

Some of the company’s hottest games are included, so this is a great opportunity if you’re looking to pick up some worthwhile bargains.

Here’s the complete list of titles on sale for just $0.99!

Chances are you’ve heard of Tamagotchi, the little handheld virtual pets that took over the world during the first decade of the 2000s, selling more than 76 million little egg-shaped devices as of 2010.

Hatch is one of the many virtual pet apps out there, but it’s an adorable one. You may even recognize the little Fugu creature from its own Facebook Messenger sticker series.

Virtual pets aren’t anything new to the iOS ecosystem, but this new collaboration between Hatch and super-popular video game Pocket God is something new. If you’ve ever thought about doing more with that little digital pal in your pocket, now might be the time. Check out the launch video below for more.

Halfbrick Studios, the folks behind massively popular endless-runner Jetpack Joyride have decided that the best way to get you to play their games is to give them away for a grand total of nothing.

The Brisbane-based game development studio was founded in 2001, and has gone on to make a ton of popular games across iOS and other platforms, including fruit-slashing hit Fruit Ninja and tongue-in-cheek giant robot game Colossatron.

There’s also Fruit Ninja Puss in Boots, the endless-runner Monster Dash, the song-creation game Band Stars, dual-stick shooter favorite Age of Zombies, and the wacky Fish Out of Water, where you get to flick various marine creatures across the top of the ocean for distance and style-based high scores.

All of these games will work on your iPhone or iPad, and — since you’re buying them at the free price now — you will own them into perpetuity.

You can grab any one of Halfbrick’s premium games for nothing right now, so head on over.

Source: iTunes

Jose Torres, CEO of Boogio, wants you to track your fitness with the most obvious part of your body: your feet.

“We’ve got 60,000 layers of sensitivity in the Boogio,” he told Cult of Mac at last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, “so we can track gravitational force, inner balance, and three different acceleration forces of your feet.”

If you haven’t gotten enough of disgruntled avians from Rovio’s hit series Angry Birds, what with last week’s Angry Birds Epic or the well-received Angry Birds Star Wars mobile games, then this news is for you.

Rovio has teamed up with Hasbro to mashup its own quirky mobile gaming franchise with yet another pop-culture phenomenon, the Transformers. And not the Michael Bay hyper-CGI movies, either. This looks to be a full-on 1980s cartoon take on the “robots in disguise” theme, complete with birds disguised as robots that can turn into cars and airplanes.

Sigh.

Facebook is trying to transform its News Feed into more than just a hotbed of baby pictures and Buzzfeed quizes and its first move is a new side panel to help users discover more timely content.

To make the app more relevant for the way people use tablets, Facebook for iPad is adding a new channel on the right-hand side of your news feed featuring trending topics, videos and tons of game suggestions to try to get users to read more news, watch more videos and play games in the app. And you can bet there will be plenty of ads to compensate.

LOS ANGELES — Drop this tactical-style vest onto your shoulders and fasten it high on your chest, and you’re suddenly feeling the action. Using audio-based haptic technology (the kind of rumbling vibrations that you’ll find in any video gaming controller), the KOR-FX turns the audio in the game into rumbles you can feel.

The makers of this new gaming peripheral have a few prototypes set up on the show floor at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week, and they’ll let all comers come and try a demo.

“Some people want to wear this thing lower on their chest, but up high is what stimulates the limbic system,” Seth Fandetti, CEO of Immerz (the makers of the KOR-FX) told us onsite at the expo. “It’s more than just feeling bullets hit you; it’s a whole immersive experience.”

Instead of trotting out the cliché question, “Are games art?,” an exhibit at the Electronic Entertainment Expo aims to explore the actual artwork from upcoming and recently announced video games.

Long gone are the pixellated abstracts of yesteryear: these are fully realized, gorgeous works of art in various styles, hung for all to see in the Los Angeles Convention Center, where the Expo takes place this week.

Developing today’s graphics-rich video games –mobile, console, or PC — takes a lot of time, talent, and passion, and the images above show the kind of artistic energy that is put into them. From the painterly styles of artwork from Assassin’s Creed Unity and Destiny to the poster illustration of The Banner Saga and Sunset Overdrive, there’s a lot to like in the images above.

All photos by Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Rovio has officially launched its latest Angry Birds game, Angry Birds Epic, for iOS devices worldwide.

Unlike previous Angry Birds sequels which have flapped their wings since the original game flew into the App Store back in 2009, Angry Birds Epic takes the form of a fantasy RPG starring both the Angry Birds and the Bad Piggies. The game soft-launched in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand back in March, but today marks the first time gamers from across the globe can get their hands on it, too.

Apple TV may have a new competitor in the form of Sony, which unveiled its PlayStation TV at Monday’s E3 event — showcasing a TV set-top box which features a strong emphasis on gaming.

Released as PS Vita TV in Japan, PlayStation TV will arrive in the U.S. and Canada this fall. It will allow users to stream games from their PS4 to other TVs in the house, thereby extending the gaming experience. It will also let you stream PS3 games and older classics via the forthcoming Playstation Now, which will presumably require no PS4. On top of this it will provide all the streaming services you’d expect from a set-top box, such as Netflix and Hulu.

The App Store is constantly evolving as both Apple and individual developers struggle to get the most out of the experience as possible. The latest change in this vein appears to involve App Store moderators cracking down on apps which incentivize or reward users for enaging in a range of activities — many related to advertising.

For an example of what we mean, consider a game which gives users more lives when they die in exchange for sharing to Facebook. Several mobile apps have recently been rejected for using these techniques, alongside offering virtual currency or additional game play for asking viewers to watch video “app trailers.”

Stealth survival game République can be pretty intense at times. For players who just want to experience the story and spend time exploring the game’s beautifully rendered environments, however, there’s a new update available which adds an easier “Story Mode” for just that purpose.

Launched in the App Store back in December last year, République features an episodic type of gameplay which sees protagonist Hope fight back against an “an oppressive totalitarian state” (making it pretty appropriate imagery for Apple.) Unlike games such as the tremendous GTA: San Andreas port, République is a console-worthy game especially designed specifically for the touchscreen environment of the iOS platform.

Certainly, it’s an immersive experience, and that doesn’t change with the game’s Story Mode, which simply makes the title more accessible to less experienced players.

Last week’s WWDC demonstrated how Apple devices can communicate with one another to make life easier for users. Well, the same holds true for games which can take advantage of the interactivity between, say, the built-in motion sensors of an iPhone and the viewing experience offered of Apple TV to replicate the experience of a full-on games consoles like the Nintendo Wii.

That’s the idea behind Rolocule Games’ innovative new game Dance Party, which is powered by something called “rolomotion” — the winner of the Silver Edison Award for best innovation in the Entertainment category at the recent 2014 Edison Awards in San Francisco. Rolomotion is a technology which precisely tracks the various movements made by an iPhone and allows users to play games using natural motion gestures on television using a combination of Apple’s smartphone and the Apple TV.

Gameloft’s previous Spider-Man games have been pretty fun, even if they’ve also been plagued by enough in-app purchases to well and truly set off our spider-sense (or, at least, overdraft fee alerts). With E3 coming up next week, Gameloft and Marvel have announced a brand new Spider-Man game called Spider-Man Unlimited, based on the Marvel comic of the same name.

This game is set to take the character of Spider-Man and place him into an endless runner scenario, with the developers promising that:

Brothers Denis and Davor Mikan make it look easy. They created a memorable and graphically beautiful puzzler called Blek that rocketed to the top of the paid game chart in the iOS App Store, making them millions in the process. Deceptively simple — with a nod to 60s pop art — the game caught the attention of Apple, too, which recently handed them a Design Award in recognition.

“It may sound simple, but it’s the Apple kind of simplicity that actually takes a lot of work,” Denis Mikan says of the game he co-created.

“It may sound simple, but it’s the Apple kind of simplicity that actually takes a lot of work.”

The idea behind Blek is ingeniously straightforward. At its simplest you draw a line on screen, and then this line repeats itself over and over until it encounters a black dot, or goes outside of the screen borders and resets. Draw the line slowly and it moves slowly, draw it fast and it moves fast. Your aim is to clear the screen of colored dots without accidentally touching a black one. But from small acorns grow mighty oaks, and since Blek arrived in the App Store a few months ago it has received close to a million downloads at $2.99 each.

Still reeling from their breakout success, Mikan told us about Blek‘s unlikely odyssey from the brothers’ hometown of Vienna, Austria, into the hearts of iOS gamers around the world. Befitting the game they brought into the world, their journey was hardly a straight line.

The sad part of buying a new console is not having enough games to play on it. That’s been the case with all three new next generation gaming machines released recently, but the trend is perhaps most noticeable with Sony’s new box, the PlayStation 4.

I purchased Sony’s hot new console on the day it came out, but the number of big new games I can run on it can easily be counted on one hand.

Sony looks to fill this gap next week at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, and it’s just released a staggeringly huge list of games (much bigger than the usual console-style announcement we’ve seen in years past) that we can look forward to seeing at their booth on the show floor, including over 40 games for the PlayStation 4 console itself.

Although we’re living through something of a golden age for original iOS games (think Monument Valley and Leo’s Fortune), it’s also a great time for iPhone gamers because we’re seeing ports of so many classic games making their way into the App Store. The latest is Capcom’s tremendous 2008 video game Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, which has just been announced as being set to arrive on iOS in the near future.

Promising a near-exact replica of the PSP title, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite will nonetheless optimize the monster-slaying experience for touch controls, as well as offering support for MFi (Made for iPhone) gamepads and improved graphics. In addition there’s set to be an online multiplayer mode, which is a big part of the game’s appeal.

Less than two months after reinventing the Hitman franchise with the superb puzzler Hitman GO, developers Square Enix Montreal have announced that they’re set to take another crack at a mobile version of Hitman with the upcoming Hitman: Sniper.

This game will take a more classic approach to the stealth-based murder-heavy series by being a game about sniping, similar to the 2012 console game Hitman: Sniper Challenge, which was tied into the release of Hitman: Absolution. Levels in Hitman: Sniper will reportedly feature multiple solutions, with leaderboards that will make the whole thing “massively competitive.”

You could run to the sun and back 160 times with the total meters run in Imangi Studio’s award-winning iOS games, Temple Run and Temple Run 2. Or you could fill 300 Olympic swimming pools with the number of gold coins collected in game (147 trillion of them, to be exact).

One billion downloads worldwide can bring a lot of success, like winning a BAFTA and Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice award in 2012. And, if you’re the company behind two of the biggest indie-hits of the last couple of years, you’re going to want to shout it from the rooftops.

“Having Temple Run reach the one billion downloads mark is a milestone we couldn’t have imagined when we first started out,” said Imangi co-founder Keith Shepherd in a press release. “We’re incredibly grateful to all the Temple Run players and our wonderful team.”

Maybe you’ve just seen the latest X-Men film. A lot of people have, so odds are pretty good. And if it left you wanting to know more about the original Days of Future Past storyline, but tracking down the trade paperback and then, like, reading it sounds like a lot of work, here’s a game you’ll want to check out.

Uncanny X-Men: Days of Future Past is out now for your favorite iOS device, and it aims to faithfully re-create the source material the way it originally appeared. This means that it’s the assassination of Senator Kelley that brings forth the robopocalypse (that character died in the first film, so he wasn’t available to die in the new one), and it’s Kitty Pryde, not Wolverine, who goes back in time to set things right.

Sure, you can play the whole game as Wolverine if you want, but if you’re a purist, you have a chance to do it “right.”

Microsoft has issued a system update to Xbox One which includes support for external storage, the ability for players to use real names on Xbox Live, and superior SmartGlass integration. To coincide with this, the company has also dropped a major update to Xbox One SmartGlass, its official iOS companion app of the latest generation of its video game console.

The update redesigns the Home section to make it more engaging for players. It additionally lets you see all your TV and app channels in the OneGuide, as well as giving you the ability to control your cable or satellite box and TV with a brand new universal remote control feature.

One of Steve Jobs’ biggest complaints about smartphones in the days before Apple created the iPhone was that they all had keyboards which were there whether or not you wanted them. Much the same has previously been true of previous iOS gamepads — which have either been clip-on phone cases in style, or else wireless controllers you need to carry around with you if you want to use them.

It’s this problem that Razer is attempting to solve with its new Junglecat accessory. Snapping onto your iPhone, the Razer Junglecat adds a slide-out gamepad that connects to your mobile device by way of the lighting port. While it adds a bit of heft to your ultra-thin iPhone (and obviously means that your lightning port remains occupied), it does mean that the gamepad itself can remain safely tucked away until you feel like using it.