games - page 44

It’s been, like, a whole day since I’ve reviewed an endless game, so it’s a good thing they come out so regularly. I don’t even know how to handle games that don’t constantly scroll anymore.

Marvel Run Jump Smash! features cartoon-styled versions of Marvel Cinematic Universe characters (and some other superpowered guests) who are perpetually sprint after Loki, the adopted brother of Thor and villain from The Avengers, to reclaim the Cosmic Cube, which is what I will always call it because “The Tesseract” makes me cringe, and all of this just makes me sound like a giant nerd, but the point is that it’s an endless runner with superheroes.

It’s not a great one, but hey. Marvel.

Episodic noir-thriller adventure game, The Wolf Among Us, gets its second episode next week with “Smoke & Mirrors.”

Bigby Wolf is hell-bent on solving the murders revealed in Episode One, and will stop at nothing to get at the truth.

Dungeon Keeper on iOS is a free-to-play re-imagining of the classic Bullfrog Productions/Peter Molyneux PC game from the late ’90s. I really loved old school Dungeon Keeper as a kid, and it is one of the few tower defense/strategy titles I’ve ever enjoyed. So, no pressure on this iOS version, right?

Unfortunately, the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper suffers from very predictable free-to-play problems. Expanding your dungeon was never totally carefree in previous version of the game, but as your imps work to clear out 3×3 or 4×4 spaces for new rooms, they’ll quickly plow through soft rock which takes a matter of seconds but suddenly run up against walls that can take an entire day to knock down! So the breakdown is a few seconds, four hours, or 24 hours. That’s not well balanced at start.

Darwin’s Theory is a simplistic match-three puzzle game charging you with the task of evolving insects into lizards (yes). You start off with a grid of caterpillars and snails. Each turn you can put different animals down on the grid, with the hope of matching three of them up. Of course that would be just too easy on its own.

You’ll also have to contend with the only moving characters on the board, or the bacteria. Once you trap them in a square, they’ll turn into berries. And somehow, those berries turn into oysters. Seriously, I don’t know. Darwin’s made of magic.

If you’ve ever played an older role-playing game, you know the feeling of reaching a point at which you realize that your characters are too weak to progress, which means that you have to take them back to previous areas and kill boars or something to earn the experience to level up and become strong enough to actually continue playing the game.

Loot Hero is a game that is all about that moment. It’s an action-RPG, kinda, that has you running back and forth like a crazy person, killing monsters to gain experience so that you can continue running back and forth like a slightly stronger crazy person. And once you hit a wall, you have to go back to older levels with easier enemies so you can run back and forth there to gain experience and money to make your character better equipped to run back and forth among stronger enemies.

It sounds like a drag, and it kind of is, but it’s also surprisingly engaging.

Obsorb is hard.

It’s not that it’s complicated or the enemies move too quickly or even that its controls are tricky. But it’s one of those games where you’ve lost as soon as it starts, and all you can do is delay the inevitable.

In theory, if you were good enough at it, you could play it indefinitely. But that’s not going to happen because it’s impossible.

I’m a sucker for two kinds of mobile games: ones featuring improbably cute characters (preferably animals because they are more cuddly) and those that promise to scare the crap out of me.

In Fear I Trust, a new horror title by developer Black Wing Foundation, falls under the second category, but this first bit is just the first two chapters of a longer story, so we can’t really write off cuddly animals completely yet. But it’s the story of a person who has survived insane and amoral experiments at the hands of crazy Russian scientists, so I’m not going to hold my breath.

So far, it’s a dark and gloomy experience with more puzzles than frights, but it still has a lot going for it.

There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.

We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.

Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of apps on the App Store that they’re using.

This week, it’s a game about bringing rainbows of happiness to sad, grey creatures, TCHOW Rainbow from TCHOW. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter “Battle” thinks.

Infinite runners are called infinite because they continue indefinitely. This is a fact, and one completely lost to the developers of Joe Danger Infinity. In this side-scrolling “racing” game, you tap the screen as Joe charges along any of the 100 toy stunt tracks provided.

You can unlock new bikes (or rockets) through the coins you collect in each stage or through micro-transactions, and generally you’re competing against other players to get the highest score.

That’s if you can figure out how to score more than a few hundred points at any time.

Recently, I was playing my favorite match-three game, and a thought occurred to me.

“This is all well and good,” I said to myself. “But it could really use a lot more punching.”

And then, because I am apparently some kind of wizard, I found Zez, an oddly-named puzzle title that has you clearing groups of three (or four) robots in order to propel a cat with a boxing glove farther into the sky so that he can inflict the maximum amount of damage to his opponent in the ring below when he comes crashing back down to Earth.

I had a fever dream once with a similar premise, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun.

Love chess, but don’t have the time or the sticking power to play a whole game? Then you should probably take a look at the $1 Mate in 1 Puzzle app, newly updated for iOS 7 and ready to puzzle your brain with something a little more satisfying that an other round of QuizUp.

Hot Rod Hustle wants to bring bitcoin wagering to the Mac and PC, with real money betting available on iOS and Android. This is the first time we’ve heard of a racing game with available real-world money rewards on any platform.

All versions of Hot Rod Hustle will use the same servers, letting those on iOS play with those on Mac, for example. The Mac and PC version of Hot Rod Hustle will allow for Bitcoin wagering, while the mobile versions will use Skillz.com, an online wagering system, which is limited to 37 states as well as the UK and Scandanavia. The cross-platform compatibility means that you can build up your hot rod on your iPhone, then log in on your Mac and race for Bitcoins. Exciting!

We have no shortage of cute games about adorable characters who need your help to get home or something comparable, but here’s something a little different.

Kid Aviator is about a young carnival daredevil fired from a cannon who is trying to fly as high as he can to spite gravity. He has a cape. He has goggles. He is awesome.

The only problem is that the sky is full of all kinds of random crap that wants to ruin his affront to physics and Nature, and that’s where you come in.

Update: A SteelSeries representative sent us the following in an email asking why the price had been reduced so soon after the initial release.

“The response of this product coming out of CES was incredibly positive, [but] the largest concern was with the price set at $99.99 MSRP. Our goal with the Stratus goes beyond just selling a controller; it’s really about helping to define a new platform. We want to see that succeed and took initiative immediately after CES to find ways where we could improve the odds of that success by lower[ing] the price. The outcome is that our team was able to work with our partners to bring the cost for the consumer down to $79.99.”

Original Post: Well, it looks like the price wars have begun in earnest. SteelSeries’ Stratus is now $79.99, instead of the $99.99 it launched for at CES. If you pre-ordered this at the older price, you’re in luck: SteelSeries will honor the new, lower cost for all pre-orders.

Sony Pictures Television has a new iOS game available in the App Store and, unlike previous titles, this one’s based on an original property.

Called Suits and Swords, the game is a cross between a blackjack card game and an RPG, set in four different fantasy realms.

If your New Year’s resolution was to age in style, then you’re clearly thinking along the same lines as the makers of The Sims FreePlay for iOS.

In its first update of 2014, the freemium mobile version of the EA life sim now lets you “complete your family tree” by aging your teen Sims into adults by completing the “Adulthood” quest, while also letting you socialize with senior sims by completing the “Seniors” quest.

Nobody likes to see a cute baby animal in danger. Sarah McLachlan has worked very hard to ensure that.

Lost Yeti is a cute game about an adorable baby yeti having a cuddly adventure. I never even knew an adventure could be cuddly, but this game taught me that it is not only possible, but preferable.

It’s also a smart, deceptively complicated puzzler that will keep you thinking, tapping, and swearing at those good-for-nothing monsters who pick on that poor little lost yeti for no reason other than that they are jerkfaces.

A key feature in iOS 7 dangles the prospect of console-style action in front of hard-core gamers hooked on action-platformers and first-person shooters. But while developers can now add controller support to games, hardware makers face a new challenge: getting gamers to shell out $100 to morph their iPhones or iPads into console killers.

Hardware maker Signal is unapologetic about the hefty price tag for its new RP One controller, one of several new gaming devices certified under Apple’s Made for iPhone (MFi) program.

“Quality is not free,” Signal’s director Mark Prince told Cult of Mac, “and it makes no sense to compare an MFi controller to a ‘bag and tag’ generic [Bluetooth] controller.”

Core gamers want to sit down with a precision controller when they immerse themselves in a console game. iOS developers compete with the big boys of console gaming like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, for their audience’s gaming dollars.

It’s a clear trend, and even Apple, which has long played the “we don’t care much about gaming” card with iOS, has finally introduced built-in code to support game controllers.

Peripheral makers Logitech, SteelSeries, and Moga have all put their efforts into iOS 7-compatible controllers, each a little different. They all run $100, though, leaving gamers wondering if Apple has set the pricing.

“$100 is probably the lowest viable price point for most if not all of us to cover development, material and manufacturing costs, plus packaging, distribution and retail margins,” said Prince. “We’d like to go on record as saying that Apple does not set these prices.”

With Nintendo recently admitting that its Wii U console has flopped — slashing its sales forecasts for the device by 70 percent, despite U.S. spending on games consoles reaching a three-year high — the rumor mill has been abuzz with reports that the Japanese games manufacturer would exit the hardware business altogether, and instead focus on creating games for existing smartphones and tablets.

Mega Jump 2 is a game about jumping. Forever.

Barrels have been a staple of video games at least since Donkey Kong used them in his vain attempts to ward off a small, mustachioed man with a penchant for jumping.

What’s the deal with barrels? Is it that they’re easy to draw? Or fun to destroy? Or is it that their size and purpose provide a wealth of possibilities, their wooden or metal frames metaphors for the endless potential that lies within all of us, just waiting for someone to pry off the lid and share our special gifts with the world? Or something else less ridiculous?

Whatever the reason, barrels are awesome, and Tap & Blast, a fun aerial platformer of sorts out now for iOS devices, flipping loves them.

Crescent Moon Games and Dead Mage have created a great action platformer here with Shadow Blade, available now in the App Store for an affordable $1.99.

It comes with Game Center Achievements and iOS 7 controller support, and a touch screen capable control scheme that works fairly well. You can read our review of the game after you watch the video below.

1981’s Qix is one of those games that just won’t die. It’s come out in its original form no fewer than four times, most recently in the Nintendo 3DS handheld’s retro-game marketplace Virtual Console in 2011 (in Japan, anyway). I’ve also seen versions of it as minigames in titles like Bully. It’s a long-lived game with a lot of versions.

And here’s another one.

Line Knight Fortix is a new variation on the old territory-capturing game with a medieval skin including dragons, ogres, and castles. The same basic idea of carving out and capturing territory before enemies cross your path and kill you remains, but you can also unlock weapons and generally just run around being all knightly and cool.

It has a couple playability issues, but it’s mostly decent.

We got a sneak peek at Codename Cygnus, a Kickstarter-funded interactive radio drama game for iOS, at PAX this last fall. Developer Reactive studios has just updated the app with more than 20 Game Center achievements, improved voice recognition, VoiceOver features, and a redesigned iOS 7 friendly interface.

Oh, and it’s cheaper, too.

Let’s take a minute to address the fact that I’m not really sure how to pronounce the title of this game. Is it “B-ombs,” or is it, “Buh-buh-buh-bombs”? My money’s on the second one, and now that we’ve sorted that out, the review can begin.

‘Bombs’ with Too Many Letters is a puzzle-ish game that tasks you with clearing a ridiculous lab of the now-sentient explosives that are now buzzing around all willy-nilly. You do this with plain, stupid, regular bombs. You get three blast per level, and you can set up chain reactions to clear a bunch of what science hath wrought in one shot.

Meanwhile, this game is hilarious.