games - page 38

If there are two things you’re likely to hear from Monument Valley players it’s this: “Wow, what an incredibly original game” and “That didn’t take long to complete.”

Both statements are totally factual. Ustwo’s puzzle game masterpiece is one of the most original games of the year, but also an experience that flies by all too quickly.

With that in mind, the developers have confirmed that they are, in fact, working on extra levels to bolster the game.

But they’re not just doing this for the sake of doing it. According to Neil McFarland, ustwo’s director of games:

If you couldn’t tell by now, I’m a sucker for a good word game, and here’s a new multiplayer offering with an interesting idea behind it.

Catena is all about you and your opponent making a chain of words. One player starts, and then the other has to come up with another word that uses one or more of the last letters of the previous entry. For example, if I played “wholesome,” my opponent could play “somewhat” or “metric” or anything else that continues the chain.

It has a few hiccups along the way, but it’s mostly a good time.

Despite being Cult of Mac’s resident comic book fan, I’ll admit that I was apprehensive about Gameloft’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft came out on iPad this week, and I can’t seem to stop playing it. The amazingly well-balanced digital collectible card battling game has got its hooks in me and won’t let up.

This is the same game as the one that came out on Mac and PC last month, but in an easy to transport and play iPad version. The touch controls are well suited to the gameplay, and you’ll find quite a bit of depth once you figure out the basic card game itself.

I spent a little time recording this free-to-play game and chatting about it in the video below.

If you like Threes but wish it was less numbery and more Tetris-like, SideSwype might be for you.

It’s a puzzler in which you, you know, swipe. To the side. And when you do that, you move every block on the board as far as it can go in that direction. So you might want to plan ahead a little.

Your goal is to line up three or more blocks of the same color to clear them, and it throws in some complications and special pieces too because otherwise it would be boring. But luckily, it has those things, and it is not boring.

The Hitman series has always alternated between vicious and silly, with a stern protagonist who will wear any kind of ridiculous costume, from ice-cream man to Mardi Gras costume, in order to murder his target. Hitman GO, a new turn-based puzzle game from Square Enix, doesn’t give you extensive dress-up options, but it is a refreshingly smart take on the series.

Hitman GO sanitizes the series’ violence by turning it into a simulated board game, with a satisfying number of missions and challenge. Presented as a collection of boxed sets with very little background audio, it’s a dramatic departure from the console games’ over-the-shoulder view and stealthy gameplay. You don’t creep in Go, but instead slide your Hitman game piece along grooves in the board, toppling other pieces when their backs are turned.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is a digital collectible card game in the vein of Magic: The Gathering, only set in the high-fantasy World of Warcraft universe. The Mac and PC version came out last month after an extended open beta period.

What may not be apparent from the above is that Hearthstone is hands down the best card battler I’ve ever played. Putting it on iPad makes it that much more habit-forming. The game is full of awesome and bad Scottish accents, which makes it all the better. (“UUUUUUUUUther versus Jaaaaaaynuh.”)

It’s really not fair — I was just starting to leave the iPad at home in favor of only the Macbook Pro in my bag. Now I need to take the tablet with me once again.

Move over FarmVille, Candy Crush and all those other freemium games whose developers (presumably) sleep on top of a pile of money with beautiful ladies in it — we may have a new contender for app overlord of 2014.

Blizzard’s turn-based iPad game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft was released Thursday, but already it’s the No. 1 most downloaded game in 36 countries, and the most downloaded app overall in 34 countries.

One of the cool things about the era of over-the-air updates is that developers can add tweaks and features specific to certain times of the year, without having to build them in from the start.

That’s what EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out iOS game has done for Easter, adding in features specific to this time of year as a way of giving a seasonal nod to Simpsons’ fans. In the same way that the game was overrun with snakes for Whacking Day, so too for Easter has Springfield been overtaken by bloodthirsty bunnies, which players must stun into submission.

Eli Hodapp is the Editor in Chief of popular iOS gaming site, TouchArcade. He’s just released his vanity project, Hodappy Bird, a humorous take on the Flappy Bird phenomenon. The game plays just like its inspiration, with a bird that looks a lot like Hodapp and a Chicago skyline background (Eli lives in the city). Hodapp gave developer Paul Pridham $50 as a joke to build the game, and Pridham made it in the course of a weekend.

It’s all in good fun, of course, but also perhaps a commentary on the recent explosion of Flappy Bird into the market. We wanted to know more, so we contacted him.

Eli took a few moments to chat with Cult of Mac via email today about his project.

Cute animals are always in trouble.

They’re always lost or in danger, or they want to eat a crap-ton of candy but can’t without your help. They’re a burden on everyone they meet, and if it weren’t for us, they would all die cold and alone in the woods from an attack by a larger animal or scurvy or something.

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t help them. Like the star of FreeDum, who has fallen into the clutches of a pint-sized Jigsaw Killer of animals. I think he’s worthy of aid, and you can do so in this fun little maze game.

If you’ve ever wanted to play Blizzard Entertainment’s wildly successful MMO World of Warcraft on your iPad, you just got your wish. Uh, kind of. After debuting on Mac and PC, Hearthstone: Heroes Of Warcraft has now been released on App Stores worldwide. But it’s actually a lot more like Magic: The Gathering than the MMO you’d expect.

Video games have always had some weird vendetta against bricks. That paddle in Breakout, Mario, Simon Belmont in Castlevania … they all busted up blocks like they caught them stealing their lunches.

To be fair, Simon Belmont often found entire hams and stuff hidden in the walls of Dracula’s castle, so maybe some food thievery had happened. I don’t know; you tell me how those hams got there.

Regardless, Shatter Alley wants to bring the blockpocalypse back, and it does so in frantic, retro fashion.

Knights of Pen & Paper +1 Edition combines two fantastic things: a brilliantly funny de-construction of a pen and paper role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons and a mobile game that uses those very same mechanics to create a habit-forming experience.

Best of all? It’s going free on Wednesday at 8 am Pacific, so you should go get yourself a copy of it. Like, right now.

Ever think that the majority of freemium iOS games are basically mindless tap-fests, with demands only for cold hard cash, and none for meaningful strategy?

Take Jurassic Park Builder, for instance: a game I reviewed back in January, and was forced to grudgingly admit was “effectively FarmVille with velociraptors” thanks to in-app purchases (IAPs).

The game looks nice enough but — unless you’re happy to cough up money to get goals done quicker — all it asks of players is to tap the screen every few minutes to check on their dinosaurs or earn in-game currency.

If that sounds the kind of job a dumb robot could do, you’re not wrong — that same idea occurred to senior art director and amateur robot builder, Uli Kilian, who built a Lego robot to carry out the task for him.

Apple has been releasing its weekly top games charts as of late, and they make interesting reading.

The latest list — published Tuesday afternoon — shows the cumulative iOS game downloads for the week running April 7 to April 13.

If you’ve played any of the new Telltale Games series The Wolf Among Us, you’ll know who that hairy dude with the bandages is. It’s Bigby Wolf (née Big Bad), the star of the fantastic adventure game series based on the Eisner award-winning comic book series, Fables, by Bill Willingham.

The doctor here is telling Bigby Wolf, the sheriff of Fable town, to take it easy, get some rest. Eat more chicken.

See the full video below.

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.

Taijitu is a game about balance and serenity. It will level you out, calm you down, and relax you … up, I guess.

I’m not sure which direction relaxation goes.

Anyway, the game. It’s laid-back, and you’ll like it. It has all the colors, and the music just made me nod off for like 20 minutes. But that’s good, really. Kinda the point.

I have a really random PlayStation 2 game on my shelf called Magic Pengel: The Quest for Color. It came out in North America in 2002, and it was basically a game in which you drew your own Pokémon and then made them fight.

Animal-abuse undertones aside, it was at least an interesting concept, and MonsterCrafter Pro follows in that same proud, if morally gray, tradition. But instead of drawing your murder-pets, you build them out of Minecraft blocks.

It’s a weird game for sure, but it has its charms.

There’s a familiar look you see on the faces of parents at theme parks. It’s a look their children are rarely able to understand — caught as they are in the clutches of school vacations and roller coasters with names like Afterburn and the Dahlonega Mine Train. It’s a look that says, ‘No matter how much fun this is, the credit card bill at the end of the holiday is going to be hell.’

Have you played Monument Valley yet? Our previous choice for ‘Game of the Week,’ this surreal, M.C. Escher-inspired puzzle game has proved an absolute phenomenon since its launch in the App Store.

But what if you’ve already finished ustwo’s masterpiece, and are now on the lookout for more of the same?

Never fear, gentle reader — we can help. Although there are precious few games which be described as similar to Monument Valley (some people aren’t even convinced it’s a game to begin with), Cult of Mac spoke with lead designer Ken Wong for his picks of the top games currently available on iOS.

Here’s what he came up with:

It seems that Nintendo has no plans to bring its extensive back catalog of games to the App Store, but fans looking to play Nintendo DS titles on their iOS devices can now pick up a new, jailbreak-free emulator.

Ambition isn’t a bad thing, but it can get in the way.

Time Gap is a free-to-play title that tries to be all free-to-play games at once. It’s mostly a hidden-object game with a plot about the ghosts of famous historical figures guiding you on a mission to discover where all the people of Earth disappeared to, but along the way, you’ll also play minigames like the ones you tab over to during the day instead of working.

It does all of these things capably enough, and it’s an interesting compendium with a lot of variety. But in the end, it’s a free-to-play game, and it is free-to-play as hell.

When last summer solstice we heard tell of the legend that Microsoft was planning to bring ye olde strategy franchise Age of Empires to iOS, we did rejoice greatly.

Today scouts from the Pacific Northwest (read: Redmond, WA) have traveled to bring tidings, and moving pictures, of the game known as Age of Empires: World Domination.