games - page 36

Have you ever experienced that giddy feeling of good fortune when a slot machine starts pouring out quarters, or a winning poker hand lets you put your arms around a big pile of chips and pull them towards your side of the table? Dragon Coins, a combination arcade “coin-pusher” and casual RPG, recreates that feeling every time you play.

It’s a dangerous precedent. Dragon Coins literally piles on the treasure when you’re on a roll, emulating the psychological appeal of casinos. As long as you are able to put the game down from time to time, or grind out low-level battles to earn extra experience, you probably won’t end up mortgaging your home or draining your kid’s college fund to pay for this game.

If you like rhythm games at all, stop reading right now and go download Record Run.

I can elaborate if you insist, but here’s what you need to know: It’s from the developer of Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Dance Central. It’s a colorful runner with simple gameplay and personality for days. And with a few taps, the game will make a level from any song stored on your iOS device.

Oh, and it’s free. Just go get it right now.

Bouncing, huffing and puffing through a beautifully-rendered cartoon world, avoiding jagged rolling wheels and collecting coins, Leo’s Fortune may just be the year’s most lovable iPhone game. But which games did its creators fall in love with?

Following our exclusive look inside behind the scenes of Apple’s iPhone “game of the month,” we asked Leo’s Fortune designer Anders Hejdenberg to name his current top five iOS games. He said he’s most impressed by titles that pair intriguing artwork with novel gameplay mechanics.

The highly imaginative Monument Valley, for instance, won him over quickly. “It didn’t take long to finish,” says Hejdenberg of his experience playing the game, “but during that time I experienced quite a few moments where I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is really cool!’ That rarely happens when I play games, so it was definitely worth the price of admission.”

Here are the other iOS games currently taking his breath away. (You’ll find download links available below the gallery.)

If you’re even slightly pop culture savvy, chances are that you’re a fan of The Walking Dead. If that’s the case, you’ll be happy to known that the latest episode of Telltale Games’ superb The Walking Dead adventure game series is set to appear on Mac and iOS this week.

Hundreds of new games come out every week in the App Store. A select few are the next must-play title that everyone will be talking about (and ripping off) for the foreseeable future. Most of them are perfectly decent but may not receive the attention they deserve. And then you have the third group: games so odd, bizarre, and head-scratching that you’re not sure what to make of or do with them.

They aren’t necessarily bad; they’re just confusing and weird. And worst of all, people may never know that they exist. But that’s why we’re here.

Here are some of the strangest games to drop into the App Store this week, and they’re all about playing with fat stacks of cash. Or change. What you do with this information is between you and your iPhone.

Wingsuit Cute is a game about a bunch of adorable animals forced to glide through the air and collect snacks while under the constant threat of smashing their widdle snoots on rocks and trees.

It really downplays the animals graphically smashing their faces open, but that’s basically what’s happening. The game takes a sunnier approach, choosing to focus on the part where tiny mammals don wingsuits in search of thrills and noms. And it’s really cute. And kinda fun, with a fair amount of challenge to keep perfect-run seekers coming back.

But it’s mostly cute.

More details are trickling out about Gameloft’s eagerly awaited first-person-shooter Modern Combat 5: Blackout, which is set to arrive on mobile later this year.

The first big reveal concerns a new unified progression system, which will aim to bring together the single-player campaign and online multiplayer modes by letting experience earned in either contribute toward your character’s overall level. This will also hold true for the game’s weapon mastery system also, meaning that whether you unlock a new weapon in campaign or multiplayer you’ll be able to use it in both.

If you’ve ever wanted to tap nervously on the screen, listen to repetitive dubstep, and watch colorful pills fall in front of your eyes, now there’s an app for that. Intake: Be Aggressive is a self-described “psychedelic shooter” for iPad that carelessly toys with the concept of club drugs, but without the trippy fun.

I expected more from Cipher Prime Studios, the makers of Splice: Tree of Life and Pulse: Volume One. Intake: Be Aggressive is a very simple tapping game where two different colors of pills fall from the top of the screen, and your job is to tap on them to chain together a combo. You can tap the space at the very bottom to switch colors and prevent the chain from breaking.

Saunter up to the bar, pardner, and we’ll tell you all about our little town here.

We need a sheriff around these parts and you look like you’d fit the badge nicely. Here’s a gun; get out there and collect rewards, shoot wild animals and round up the bad guys.

Oh, and don’t mind the funny green light ’round these parts. It’s just how we get things done.

Once again, I’m here to tell you about a little minimalist game that has completely kicked my ass.

It’s called Lumena, and it doesn’t look like much until you play it and fail in like two seconds. And then you try again, and again you fail because the game is, in fact, so minimal that it doesn’t even bother to tell you how to play it. But after a while, you figure it out (it’s not really that complicated), and with newly found confidence, you give it another shot. And you lose in five seconds.

But stick with it because it’s way better than I’m making it sound.

Don’t Starve is a brilliant yet brutal video game that will not hold your hand as it leads you inexorably toward a messy, starving death.

Until now, it’s been a single-player affair, which just reinforces the theme of loneliness present in every ticking second of each of the in-game days and nights.

Klei Entertainment, at the frantic urging of its fan base, is finally bringing a final feature to the game that we all wanted: a shared experience.

This summer, we can huddle together with other players, avoiding the rampaging hounds of doom and giant tree monsters bent on our destruction in ecstatic togetherness.

I’ve been playing video games for almost 30 years. I like to think that I’ve developed a certain level of hand-eye coordination and an ability to recognize patterns and learn rules reasonably quickly.

But Spirit Run: Fire vs. Ice, a new endless runner from developer Lunagames, made me question all of that. Suddenly, I was transforming when I wanted to jump, and jumping when I wanted to slide, and just falling the hell off of things that I normally wouldn’t.

That isn’t to say that it’s a bad game; it’s actually quite good. But be prepared to feel like a monkey trying to do algebra. You know, if that’s a thing that one might call upon monkeys to do.

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.

Imagine a game that mashes up the best of a classic strategy game like speed chess and a modern hit like League of Legends. If you do, you’ll probably come up with something like Aerena: Clash of Champions, a steampunk-themed turn-based strategy game that uses the hero mechanics of other massively online battle arena games like Dota 2 in a painstakingly created digital board game arena.

The game will go free-to-play this Wednesday on Steam (it’s already out for Android tablets — iOS versions to come soon), and is a great new gaming experience — we’ve been playing it all morning. It takes only a short while for the casual gamer to learn how to play, but there is enough strategy and balanced mechanics to give core players a ton of depth.

If you’re super savvy, though, you’ll grab the early access copy today for $10, which nets you a full $30 worth of downloadable content, extra heroes and more. Either way, Aerena is a brilliant game and deserves your attention.

For you gamers out there that aren’t looking to spend an arm and a leg for Call of Duty: Ghosts you can now experience this award-winning title for pennies on the dollar … thanks to Cult of Mac Deals!

Fighting as both a U.S Marine and British S.A.S. soldier, in Call of Duty 4 you will utilize sophisticated technology and weaponry to take control of the battlefield and to lead your squad to victory. You’ll get hours of action packed, gun wielding fun with one of the best FPS franchises out there. And all for just $9.99!

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.”

Ubisoft’s upcoming Watch Dogs console game is hoping to upend the traditional boundaries between single- and multi-player gaming, allowing you to hack into other players’ games on the fly, earning experience and renown points which you can then use to level up your own character’s skill levels.

The game was a huge surprise at last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), and has since been getting a ton of attention from gamers and the press as the May 27 release date looms.

Even better, you’ll be able to interact with the very same game and players via a free mobile app, letting you increase the heat on rogue players, as you can see in this fairly long and detailed play through video below. Sure, the video is ridiculously longer than most gamer’s attention spans, but it’s well worth a look.

Here’s yet another artsy, minimalist puzzle game you’ll want to check out.

Bicolor gives you some colored blocks with numbers on them, and your job is to swipe them around to make the entire screen a single color. It sounds easy — and it typically is, if I’m honest — but it has moments of beauty and elegance that make you forget that it isn’t challenging you. And it’s fun enough without the head-scratching because, like all minimalist puzzle games, it’s about calm, man.

And as long as you keep that in mind, the two of you will get along just fine.

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.

May 4th only comes around once per year, and Star Wars fans know it as Star Wars Day.

We love puns as much as we love savings here at Cult of Mac Deals, so we’ve assembled The “May The Fourth Be With You” Star Wars Gamer Bundle to help every Cult of Mac reader celebrate Star Wars Day for a fraction of the regular price – just $16.50!

Hundreds of new games come out every week in the App Store. A select few are the next must-play title that everyone will be talking about (and ripping off) for the foreseeable future. Most of them are perfectly decent but may not receive the attention they deserve. And then you have the third group: games so odd, bizarre, and head-scratching that you’re not sure what to make of or do with them.

They aren’t necessarily bad; they’re just confusing and weird. And worst of all, people may never know that they exist. But that’s why we’re here.

Here are some of the strangest games to drop into the App Store this week, and they’re all about food (mostly desserts, oddly enough). What you do with this information is between you and your iPhone.

If you’re looking to get away from it all, you might want to check out this game. …and then it rained is an arcade game full of sound, rain, and colors, and it’s the perfect game for a quiet few minutes away from the hectic pace of your life.

With true zen-like minimalism, there are just a few simple mechanics at work here, but it may just be the best game you play all week.

Check out the video below to see how it plays.

Great games don’t always need amazing graphics and sound, but they do need a strong premise and a lot of heart. A Dark Room, an outstanding text-based adventure game with minimal graphics, starts off as a simple survival story and eventually blossoms into a full-on Fallout-style role-playing game (RPG).

Much of the joy of playing A Dark Room is watching it unfold in surprising new ways. The game starts simply — you’re alone in the dark with a single button to press to start a fire. Eventually, new buttons appear so you can perform actions like collecting wood, and a character called the Builder shows up to help you form a shelter.

When you first start playing Hill Runner, it seems impossible. And then after a few dozen dismal failures, you have a really good run and restore your faith in yourself. And then you’ll mess up the next try immediately.

It’s a glass case of emotion, this game.

But it’s very simple, and it’s free, and it’ll offer some distraction and charm for a few minutes if that’s all you’re looking for.

New game Mutants: Genetic Gladiators aims to be your go-to when you want to battle it out with comic book-style monsters that you mutate and create yourself.

The game, from French publisher Kojobo, originated on Facebook, gathering almost 6 million players with a turn-based arena battling scheme that mixes role-playing level-up mechanics with an interesting combat system that uses various monster “genes” to add to the strategy. You’ll choose three mutant gladiators for your battle team, and then pit them against other teams — both AI-controlled and actual other players — for ultimate supremacy.

Check out the launch trailer below for some hot comic-book creature battling action.