games - page 40

What are you doing?

You would tell yourself, “I am reading a review for Sometimes You Die.” You take it for granted that I am going somewhere with this. My opinion is just a shadow. A number.

Alright, I can’t keep that up, but before you leap into the Internet and punch me in the face, know two things: First, that was a taste of the narration for the oddball minimalist platformer Sometimes You Die. And second, I’m still recovering from my last face punch, so don’t be a jerk.

As for the game, it’s brilliant. You don’t even need to read the rest of this. Just go buy it and get it in your brain-hole.

Remember that slick-looking Diablo-style hack and slash game we raved about, KingsRoad? We were astonished that such a full-on console-level action RPG game was available on Facebook when we saw it demoed at the Game Developers Conference a couple of weeks back.

Well, now we can finally come clean and share the news: KingsRoad is coming to iPad. You’ll be able to play with all your Facebook buddies, too, as the game will use the very same servers across all platforms.

Loot and raid on my Mac, and then take it on the go? Yes, please.

Head on over to the Hyper Light Drifter Kickstarter page and you’ll immediately get a sense of just how hot this new bame from Heart Machine is going to be. With a modest goal of $25,000, the project garnered over $645,000 before it finished, and it looks to be well worth every pledge.

Just check out the moody, atmospheric video below, and you’ll see why we’re hyper-excited for this new indie adventure game.

Think sport should be less about good sportsmanship and complex rules, and more about violence?

Clearly developer HooAh agrees on some level, because its upcoming iOS game Bench Clearing re-imagines baseball (a.k.a. “America’s favorite pastime”) as a massive free-for-all battle.

Hate freemium or ad-supported games? Tough noogies.

Side-scrolling shoot-em-ups are typically exercises in excess. You have no shortage of enemies, power-ups, or ridiculously large bosses, and most importantly, you have all the bullets you’ll ever need. Just hit the button anytime, and bullets come out. That’s how it works.

“Oh, really?” says Exodite. “How about if it didn’t?” And that’s when things get a little weird.

By limiting your ammo, Exodite brazenly defies decades of tradition. And it’s kind of brilliant for that.

Note: This article was originally published in Cult of Mac Magazine, available on the App Store.

Flappy Bird came onto the scene with a bang, ruffling feathers from Hanoi to Hannover. Dong Nguyen, the developer of this seemingly overnight sensation, was as taken aback as the rest of us, evident from his shocking decision to stop offering the game for download as well as his recent decision to bring it back.

Game developers and publishers can only hope to reproduce this kind of crazy success. And each and every one of the people we talked to at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was eager to share opinions on how Flappy Bird happened, how it might happen again, and why it was such a runaway hit to begin with.

Long-time gamers know that nine times out of ten getting excited about a movie tie-in will in end in disappointment. At the same time, the last few years have been pretty good when it comes to comic book titles making their way onto consoles, computers, and mobile devices.

It was a close call this week in our games department, as reviewer extraordinaire Evan Killham lobbied hard for his favorite, Words & Cards. Granted, it’s a great game, but I had to push back a bit. Plus, I’m the editor, so I win.

Star Wars Assault Team is kind of the perfect blend of role-playing game stickiness with digital collectible card game features, all put together with your favorite Star Wars characters to boot.

The writing is great, with plenty of nods to the iconic movie series, and we finally get to see something new: how you spell Chewbacca’s roars. Really, that’s worth the download right there.

Here’s our Game of the Week video below to show you a bit of the game play.

Any old physics puzzler can ask you to fling a ball into a goal with a bunch of springs or conveyer belts whatever. And most of them don’t care how you get the ball there, as long as it does.

But Lightlands thinks you can do better than that, and it encourages you to get the ball to its home along the most efficient route possible.

You can still go the “no pictures on scorecards” route and just get the thing to the other thing, but where’s the challenge in that?

Ahead of its April 4 U.S. theatrical release, Gameloft’s movie tie-in Captain America: The Winter Soldier – The Official Game has arrived in the App Store.

An original adventure co-scripted by Marvel, the game lets you play as Captain America as you lead a S.H.I.E.L.D. Strike Team to take down enemies. The game promises intense combat with plenty of tactical elements, RPG features which let you learn new fighting techniques and upgrade weapons, and an asynchronous multiplayer mode.

Look, Legos are for everyone, ok? With the huge success of the latest Lego Movie, it’s clear that playing with the building bricks isn’t just for kids anymore, if it ever was.

If you’ve been in a comic, toy, or hobby shop lately, chances are you’ve seen the little random minifigure bags that you can buy, not knowing exactly which minifigure is contained within, like a mini treasure hunt.

Funcom is banking on this craze with its upcoming release of Lego Minifigures Online for iPad, Android tablets, and PC, hoping to trade on the fact that one of the coolest features of the modern Lego experience is the little people that seem to come with every construction model set sold.

Sadly, there’s no Mac version planned as yet, but the iPad game will play the same as the PC and Android versions, on the same servers.

Cult of Mac saw a preview of Pirate World for Lego Minifigures Online last week at GDC, and we’re finally allowed to post it below.

I like Scrabble and poker, and I’ve often wished that there were some way to combine them. We could call it “Scroker.” Or “Pabble.”

I haven’t, actually, because who would think of doing that? Plus, those awesome names are copyright me. Don’t steal them.

Anyway, Ayopa Games did think of it, and now we have Words and Cards, a catchy and fun social mobile game that will have you spelling and trying to remember if a flush is better than a straight. Spoiler alert: It is.

It’s not that often that the Mac gamers out there get to download new content for a big title game like BioShock Infinite on the same day as their Windows-using brethren, but here it is.

Well-known Mac gaming company Aspyr has done just that, announcing on Wednesday that the latest and final episode of BioShock Infinite’s story-driven “Burial At Sea” module has just dropped on the Mac.

Disruptor Beam and HBO revealed on Wednesday the debut of Game of Thrones Ascent on the iPad. It was originally released in 2013 as a Facebook game, making last year’s Facebook Games of the Year list to boot.

Now you can play Game of Thrones Ascent on your iPad, leading the life of a noble in Westeros, collaborating and conniving with other players in a persistent online world.

For the company behind Candy Crush, developer King Digital don’t exactly seem to be crushing it in their public market debut on the New York Stock Exchange.

Shares in the popular developer — which grossed $1.88 billion last year — were valued at $22.50 on Tuesday. They then debuted at $20.50 on Wednesday, before quickly dipping to $19.06.

I should warn you now, the iOS version of Shin Megami Tensei is perhaps the most bewildering game you’ll play on your phone. The game world is unforgivingly nondescript, and you navigate it in first person. It’s very easy to get lost indoors and bypass important people and doors until you get the hang of navigating. I recommend you pause briefly before entering any room to see if a nameplate appears — otherwise you’ll be running in circles. Also, Atlus’ strange control panel shell for SMT is a little unwieldy. I played in landscape mode in order to take screenshots, but I highly recommend playing in portrait mode as the interface buttons are smaller, easier to reach, and not covering the game screen.

You start off in the midst of a terrifying dream where spirits are being tormented by demons. You rescue your future teammates by saying their names, which breaks the demons’ hold. And suddenly, you wake up. A ghastly murder in a parking lot has set your bustling city on edge and a weird man named Steven is constantly sending you information about a demon summoning program. Yet your mother still wants you to go out and get coffee.

Developer Parsec Productions’ PC horror title Slender: The Eight Pages was one of my favorite games of 2012. It packs an impressive amount of horror and suspense into a very simple idea — being lost in the woods while an unbeatable enemy relentlessly pursues you — and it was one of the few games I’ve ever played that really and truly terrified me.

It makes sense that others would want to get in on that action, and while you have plenty of Slender Man games to choose from in the App Store, Dead Room: The Dark One takes the same basic concept and puts its own creepy spin on it.

And as fairly overt copies go, it’s pretty good.

Guitar Hero will vanish from the App Store at the end of this month.

Not the best rhythm game available, but still a lot of fun, we praised Guitar Hero back when it first arrived on iOS in 2010. With its price now reduced to 99¢ as a parting gift, it’s absolutely worth picking up if you’re interested in the genre.

Ultra-addictive iOS game Dots has just received a major update, adding a significant new feature.

Called “Challenge Mode,” the addition circumvents the hassle of taking screenshots of individual dots counts — or else comparing scores via social media — by letting players face off in real-time, head-to-head competition.

Finnish developer Supercell has a huge hit on its hands with Clash of Clans, and they’re releasing a brand new follow-up that looks surprisingly similar: Boom Beach.

In Clash of Clans, you build a base and defend it with your medieval warriors. You can also go out and attack other people’s bases.

In the trailer for Boom Beach, you might notice a familiar mechanic at work.

Penguins are pretty amazing.

Maybe you’ve seen March of the Penguins, and maybe you haven’t, but they’re brave little creatures who just happen to be food for some terrifying creatures. But they don’t let that get them down because they’re penguins, damn it, and that means something.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, but Adventure Beaks is a really fun new free-to-play iOS game where you lead an elite squad of penguins through a platforming adventure for fortune and glory. And you can jack some seals up while you’re at it, so that’s like icing on the cake.

But it’s the Antarctic, so it’s basically all icing, but you get my point.

You know the drill: You’re up against an endless stream of foes moving toward you, and all you can do is move back and forth and shoot. They may be space invaders or enemy fighters or weird … animal things or something, but it’s always up to you and your single dimension of movement to stop them.

And then TriBlaster shows up and is all, “Pssssh, let’s double that.” So the developers added in a jump button, and suddenly things get completely different.

That’s right, people. Two dimensions. Welcome to the future.

This week, our intrepid Games Editor Rob LeFebvre brings readers of Cult of Mac Magazine all the news from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

There were dueling VR 3D headsets, discussions about sexism in the games industry, contests, awards and plenty of action on the show floor.

But the million-dollar question this year was: How do I make the next Flappy Bird?

Of the endless barrage of clones that emerged after Flappy Bird’s surprise success, Flapthulhu is the one that I go back to over and over again. Not only is it a clever parody of both the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the Flappy Bird phenomenon in general, but it’s a genuinely better game than Flappy Bird, with a subverseive sense of humor, fantastic 8-bit style graphics great style. Now, Flapthulhu has gotten better thanks to a version 2.0 update, which adds to major new features.