games - page 39

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.

Fancy building your own glittering high-tech utopia, or a bustling cosmopolitan metropolis?

Either way, gamers will be happy to know that SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition today became available for download, exclusively in the Mac App Store. Combining both SimCity 4 and the Rush Hour expansion pack — which adds bonus disasters like UFO attacks and Autosaurus Wrecks — the game is a steal at $19.99.

If I’ve learned nothing else from science-fiction shows like Firefly and Cowboy Bebop, it’s this: If society crumbles, even a little, we will revert back to a Wild-West mode of life.

I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s just more simple. Maybe it’s more practical. Odds are, though, that it’s just a cool motif for a story, and if you can get some spaceships or motorbikes in there, too, it’s like a bonus.

Trials Frontier, the latest in publisher Ubisoft’s physics-driven racing game franchise is out now, and it takes place in a rustic, post-apocalyptic world. But if you don’t care about that stuff, it’s also the series’ first appearance on mobile. And it’s free to play. And it’s really, really good.

The success of The Simpsons: Tapped Out meant it was only a matter of time before Family Guy got similar mobile game treatment.

First announced back in December, today marks the arrival of Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff in the App Store.

A joint venture between Fox and TinyCo studios, the game lets you help Peter Griffin and the rest of the Quahog residents to rebuild their city after it’s destroyed.

Expect lots of fan service, in the form of regular Family Guy characters and reprised gags from previous episodes (Mermaid Peter, Rambo Lois, and the Petercopter, for instance.)

The robots are coming, you guys. And they want all of our ice cream. What are we going to do?

We could call in the military, or we could devise some kind of electromagnetic pulse. Or, what the heck, let’s just stand out in the street and throw bricks at them. None of these ideas will work. But here’s a fun new game that knows the correct answer.

Robots Love Ice Cream knows that all free people must be prepared to sacrifice everything to protect that freedom, and the same should be true of tasty desserts. So obviously the best course of action is to convert an ice-cream truck into a rolling tank that fires single-scoop cones with enough velocity to penetrate an invading robot’s cold, unfeeling metal hull.

I mean, duh.

For each noble house in the Seven Kingdoms, the choices that leaders make often lead to tragedy and ruin. In Game of Thrones: Ascent, you play as an up-and-coming noble who, through endless decision-making and item crafting, can move a bit closer to the Iron Throne. However, failure and death aren’t a real option in Ascent; instead, it’s all about waiting and paying.

Game of Thrones: Ascent originally launched on Facebook, and it’s a free to play game, so you can expect two things right off the bat. First, this casual game is so basic that you can’t possibly lose — the only consequence for making poor decisions is that you’ll waste some time. Second, there’s a lot of waiting involved, and even the most basic actions can take hours to complete.

Back in the early 1990s there was a series of handheld games consoles made by Japan’s Epoch company. Called Barcode Battlers, they let you enter the numbers from real world barcodes to generate characters, monsters, and power-ups, which could be used as part of in-game battles. Novelty aside, they were never much good, but they were certainly popular — and the idea was intriguing enough that the Barcode Battlers are still remembered today.

Disruptor Beam, the company behind Game of Thrones Ascent, hopes to thrill the thousands of Star Trek fans worldwide with its upcoming social strategy roleplaying game, Star Trek Timelines.

You’ll need to build your own starship and crew to boldly go where no one has gone before, exploring the Star Trek multiverse alongside characters from all eras of Trekdom.

There’s a new teaser trailer with the voices of Commander Data, Leuitenant Uhura, and Captain Jean Luc Picard to get you excited.

I find the premise of Millie highly dubious.

It’s a puzzle game that uses the same basic concept as the classic Snake: You’re trying to lead a cute little millipede through a series of mazes, collecting pellets and shoes and navigating in such a way that she does not collide with herself. And the point of all of this is to get her to aviation school so that she can become a pilot.

That’s seriously what this game is about. It’s fun enough, but what?

Editor’s Note: Due to the sheer size of Elder Scrolls Online, we’re publishing our hands-on impressions in three chunks. Here’s part one.

I dash up a sandy dune, rushing past palm trees, looking for the spot on my map where an eyeball icon beckons my attention. The sky is blue — it’s mid-day here in the Hammerfell region — with a few clouds to tease the eye. It’s hot enough to fry an egg on my heavy armor, but hey, I’m not really running anywhere.

As I crest the little hill, a brilliant lens-flare from the sun draws my attention skyward, distracting me from the broken bridge. I tumble heavily to the sea below, splashing into the water.

I’m in good company: there’s a small school of orcs and elves who have made the same rookie mistake. We make the slow swim of shame to the sandy beach, then rush off to explore this idyllic, if tricky, land.

This all takes place on the continent of Tamriel, which will be familiar to gamers who’ve played the previous titles in the series: Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind. It’s like Middle Earth for game nerds. While each of the previous games took place in just one area of Tamriel, the Elder Scrolls online promises the whole land mass.

It’s paradise –I wonder if I can bring my kids with me when I move here.

Looking for a more explosion-filled egg hunt this Easter?

If so, you may want to check out the latest version of popular third-person shooter Respawnables which adds a new Easter Egg Hunt mode, where players must gather as many Easter eggs as they can and collect prizes in doing so.

Princess Ida needs to find herself, and she’s doing so with a quest across an unpredictable and shifting landscape that takes inspiration from perspective-bending Escher art and hit indie game Fez.

You’ll need to tap on the screen to get Ida moving to her end goal, swiping and rotating dozens of different mechanical gadgets to make sure she can continue on her way. The puzzles aren’t super difficult, but they do require a bit of thought, and plenty of them are downright ingenious. You’ll feel pretty darn intelligent when you finally get that “aha!” moment.

Check out our play-through video below to get a sense of how lush and calming Monument Valley really is.

15 Coins is hard. Alright, that was the shortest review I’ve ever written. I’ll be back Monday.

Apparently, my editor refuses to pay me for three sentences, so I guess I’ll elaborate.

15 Coins is an arcade avoidance game where you’re trying to collect the eponymous pick-ups before you run into a past version of yourself and explode. Probably because of a paradox or whatever happened to Ron Silver at the end of Timecop. Actually, I think the game calls your pursuers “drones,” but they look like you and follow the same path you did, so I’m just going to go ahead and call time travel on this one. The point is that it’s difficult.

As the old song goes, “Google Maps and QuizUp, sitting in a tree, now both visible from low-Earth orbit.” It’s not catchy, but it is true – now the super-addictive trivia game has a Google Maps channel.

Borderlands 2. BioShock Infinite. Civilization V. Just a few of the AAA titles hit with deep discounts at Aspyr’s GameAgent game store as the platform celebrates reaching 100,000 members. How deep? All the above-mentioned titles can be had at 75 percent off. Even non-Aspyr titles like Napoleon: Total War and XCOM: Enemy Unknown will be discounted, though at only (only!) half-off.

Sure, we all love a good game of Civilization V, but we also all know that the epic turn-based strategy can really suck up our time.

That’s one of the reasons we’re so excited about Hero Generations, a Rogue-like strategy game with a unique, personal question at its core: what will you do with the limited time you have left?

You’ll have plenty of choices, but your character will age one year for each turn in the game. If you want to truly influence the kingdom, you’ll need to find a mate, settle down, and have a child.

Your offspring, then, becomes the next controllable character in the game, with all the experience and items that you amassed before you died.

If that doesn’t intrigue you, I’m not sure what will.

Monument Valley is what would happen if Fez and The Room (the game, not the movie) took place inside of M.C. Escher’s sketchbook.

It has a vibrant, interesting world full of impossible geometry, mysterious accusers, and bothersome crows. It’s a puzzle game and a jumpless platformer, and it’s endlessly amazing and mind-boggling to behold.

It is also one of the easiest games I’ve ever played, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check it out.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Your game may be great, but languish in a cobwebbed corner of the iTunes store. That was almost the fate of Little Inferno, an original downloadable game launched in 2012 by indie outfit Tomorrow Corporation. They made some mistakes — big and small — that all devs hope to avoid.

One of the many cool things at the Game Developers Conference each year is the post-mortem talk, a look at what a game did well, or not so well, by the developers who made the game. This year, we were lucky to hear a talk about Little Inferno and the mistakes the team made along the way.

Quick, think of two classic game franchises that make perfect sense as a mash-up! Give up? How about Street Fighter II and Flappy Bird? Not convinced of the brilliance of this idea? Well too bad — someone’s done it anyway.

Joining the plethora of Flappy Bird clones to arrive in the App Store since Dong Nguyen’s hit original, Street Flapper lets you take your favorite Street Fighter characters and guide them through an “endurance training” setup composed of the stretchy arms and legs of character Dhalsim.

The year might only be three months old but there’s already a contender for ‘most visually striking iOS game of 2014.’

Launched today, Monument Valley looks to combine the gameplay of hit indie game Fez with the brain-twisting art of M.C. Escher.

As can be seen from the above trailer it looks stunningly beautiful, and with developers Ustwo (the team responsible for Whale Trail and Blip Blup) behind it, hopefully the gameplay will be every bit as great. The trailer depicts Princess Ida climbing through landscapes of shifting geometric shapes, optical illusions, and hidden paths — all the while avoiding and outsmarting the enigmatic Crow People.

Alright, so we’ve endlessly run, flown, swam, and jetpacked. Why not add skateboarding to that list?

Skyline Skaters is a new free-to-play endless skateboarder that transports you to a world with one of the most ridiculously strict police forces ever. I always thought it was weird in Jet Set Radio Future when the official response to graffiti was for a bunch of officers to run down perpetrators and hold them down so that their boss could come up and shoot them with his giant hand cannon.

These police are a little less hands-on, opting to chase down renegade skateboarders with a helicopter and catch them with a comically large claw. As for the game itself, it’s a fun time once you suspend that disbelief.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Games make up more than 65 percent of downloads in the App Store and Google Play, and a whopping 90 percent of mobile gaming revenue is generated by a freemium business model, according to Bertrand Schmitt, CEO of App Annie.

These are just two of the insights that came from a trends panel at the Game Developers Conference last month in San Francisco. The panel also included folks from gaming engine Unity and publisher/developer Pocket Gems.

Evolution, just released on the App Store, is looking like a badass free-to-play science fiction role-playing game with real style.

Build your base to collect resources, battle with your character in real time, solve environmental puzzles, and upgrade everything–weapons, armor, special abilities–as you go.

All of this and free to boot, Evolution promises to meet your sci-fi combat gaming needs on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

Apple has released its latest weekly list of the most downloaded games in the App Store.

Unlike a near-realtime list like the iTunes chart, this list reflects cumulative total downloads over a 7-day period — in this case March 24 to March 30.

Perhaps the most notable inclusions are the success of Papa’s Freezeria To Go and Backflip Madness in the paid charts, and the Threes!-inspired 2048 and Boom Beach in the free charts. Here’s the whole list: