games - page 45

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.

Crescent Moon Games has published a string of fantastic iOS games of late, including cute-as-pie Mimpi, deep RPG Ravensword: Shadowlands, first person shooter Neon Shadows, and the unforgettable Space Chicks. Each one approaches controls for touch screens in a unique and fairly successful way.

The publisher’s 2D side-scrolling action platformer Shadow Blade takes things even further, utilizing a complex but ultimately responsive control scheme. The game is made in Unity, giving it fluid, console-quality animations, a lush eastern-flavored soundtrack, and a gorgeous look and feel.

This is a fine effort from first-time iOS developer Dead Mage, for sure.

More than 30 years old as a concept, and one of the very first iOS games to be released in the App Store back in the day, Pac-Man is a genuine O.G. of the gaming world.

With Apple currently giving it away for a limited time as part of its “App of the Week” promotion, we at Cult of Mac thought the time was right to pay homage by revisiting one of the all-time-greats.

So how does it measure up here in 2014?

Fans of word games are always looking out for new apps that will let them arrange letters and clear blocks or cross things or whatever else people do when they’re using text as game pieces. Here’s another game that lets you do that.

It’s called Alpha 9, and it’s basically Boggle plus Tetris. Your goal is to form words of at least three letters in order to clear lines from a board to keep the letter blocks dropping from the ceiling from piling up to the top of the screen.

That’s Wall Mode, anyway. It has another game type, but they’re both pretty average.

If you’re used to games taking time to explain what they are and how you play them, then Simian Interface may not be for you.

But you should play it anyway, wuss, because you don’t need that much instruction to understand this one. The game leaves it up to you to figure out what it wants and how to do it, but it’s really not that hard to figure out.

And if you put the time in and go along for the short time it takes to play through it, you’ll get a unique, entirely satisfying experience.

Apparently, I’m a sucker for minimalist puzzle games.

You can find a lot of them in the App Store, and I’ve reviewed more than a few since I’ve been here. I like the simplicity, the clean interface, the solid blocks of color … it’s all very relaxing. And then I play something like Lyne, a new puzzler that looks like those other zen games, but then you start playing it and realize that beneath its sparsely populated surface is a relentless battle for your sanity.

In a good way. Mostly.

One of the first video games I ever finished was 1985’s Kung Fu, a port of a Japanese arcade game (Kung Fu Master)for the original Nintendo system. It was a side-scrolling beat ’em up about a guy fighting through five floors of a goon-filled building to rescue his girlfriend, and even though it’s probably not nearly as good as I remember, it’ll always have a special place in my nostalgia bank because I was so good at it back then.

Fightback is a new free-to-play fighter from developer Ninja Theory (makers of super-shiny console games like the PlayStation 3’s Heavenly Sword and the recent reboot of Devil May Cry), and it’s basically an updated version of Kung Fu. It even has the same 2D gameplay and girlfriend-rescuing premise and graphics and music that call back ridiculous action films from the ’80s.

So needless to say, I like this game a lot.

It’s been a little while since I reviewed a tank game, so I picked up Battle Supremacy, a new tread-and-turret action title from the developers of Sky Gamblers out today for iOS devices.

Battle Supremacy takes place during World War II and features authentic vehicles and locations. It’ll have you participating in campaigns in both the European and Pacific Theaters. If you can stop firing long enough to look around, you’ll see birds in the sky and fish in the water. And you can run over absolutely anything that gets in your way. It’s an action-packed, detailed game with incredible graphics.

And honestly, I thought it was kind of boring and clunky.

Particularly if you grew up in the 1980s, you’ll be familiar with games like the Castlevania series which ask the player to invade a villain’s lair.

Adult Swim’s new strategy game Castle Doombad cleverly turns that concept on its head: with gamers taking on the role of the princess-kidnapping Dr. Lord Evilstein, tasked with defending his tower against the various heroes who try and save the day.

LAS VEGAS — We’ve been SteelSeries fans for quite a while now, what with their stellar line up of headphones and gaming peripherals for both Mac and iOS.

The Chicago-based company just released what they’re calling the first Bluetooth-enabled official iOS 7 gaming controller, the Stratus.

We hung out with the team a bit at CES, and what we saw looks pretty damn sweet. Check it out.

Episode One of developer Sunside’s six-part, hybrid adventure series is out now in the App Store, and it’s a promising start.

Abducted pulls from a variety of genres to build its sci-fi world and mechanics, including point-and-click (and text!) adventures, role-playing games, and even survival horror. It’s also a really good-looking game with an intriguing setting and enough mysteries to keep you moving on to see what’s next.

And if you have a device that can play it, you’ll enjoy it quite a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxuacwotoQw

Terry Cavanaugh is one of the more talented developers in indie game development right now, with his famously difficult game Super Hexagon taking one of our top picks for 2012 Game Of The Year.

One of Cavanaugh’s previous games was a Metroid-like retro space platformer called VVVVVV. It’s available on Mac, and super fun, featuring a reversible gravity mechanic that makes the game one of the biggest charmers to hit the indie gaming scene in years. And now, it’s coming to the iPhone and iPad.

The Independent Games Festival (IGF), held every spring at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, is a celebration of the independent spirit. It’s both a gauge of the cutting edge in game design as well as an increasingly popular event among gamers of all stripe.

This year, the list of nominees for the awards contains a veritable boat-load of games that are available on iOS or Mac. It’s a who’s-who of the hot new games tat everyone’s talking about as well as a notice that mobile gaming is definitely on the map.

Just after we waxed rhapsodic about the new SteelSeries Stratus iOS 7 gaming controller comes a new controller to the news cycle, the Signal RP One.

If the picture above is any indication, this one is sized more like a typical console controller in the Xbox style than SteelSeries’ mini stature, which could bode well for Signal, as not everyone has the tiny hands to deal with a smaller controller device.

The original Jet Car Stunts rocked the App Store back in 2009 — blowing away our memories of fiddly pre-iPhone racers with a colorful speedster of a game that took full advantage of the device’s touch interface and accelerometer to create something truly addictive.

If you played the original Feed Me Oil a couple years ago, you probably fell in love with its surreal graphics and fun, physics-based puzzles. If you didn’t, the name is probably confusing the hell out of you. Because you really shouldn’t feed anything oil, right? That’s super gross.

Don’t get stuck on that, though, because Feed Me Oil 2 is out now, and it features the same addictive gameplay with shinier graphics and some new tools to get that oil where it needs to go.

And where it needs to go is, like, right into the mouth of a weird, animal-like hill or something. But again, don’t dwell on that because if you do, you’re missing out on a great game.

Interactive zombie film series The Hunting is back with its third installment, which has you continuing to make life-threatening choices and furiously tapping on your screen to run and fight off crazed undead who want to put the nom on you.

It’s another creepy, high-tension experience that will quickly make you regret playing it with headphones and/or in the dark, both of which I did because I clearly don’t know what’s good for me.

But while the game is still completely scary and harrowing as ever, it fails to build on Part 2’s impressive shotgun blast of terror and what-the-hell-ery.

I went into Ark Saver expecting it to flounder about like the Noah’s Ark mini game in Bible Adventures on NES. I’m incredibly surprised that it is not only playable but pretty addictive.

The goal in Ark Saver is to match the next animal in a long line with its pair as quickly as you can. Each level gives you 30 seconds to pair 50 or more sets, and each level introduces more creatures to match. To get the highest score, you’ll need to maintain a combo streak that breaks every time you tap the wrong picture. Luckily, the only harm breaking a combo repeatedly has is decreasing your overall score.

Okay, so you’ve mastered Super Crate Box, and you’re so good at Super Hexagon that you can’t play it anymore without yawning. And maybe you’ve also bested a Sasquatch at arm-wrestling, and you’re the King of the Oompa-Loompas because those two things are just as likely.

But if you like those other games and are looking for something “inspired by” them, you’d do well to check out Atomic+, a recently released arcade/twitch/minimal title that puts you in the position of an electron that can leap between atomic orbits and has a lot of stuff flying at it constantly.

So maybe not quite like an actual electron, but you get my point.

Have you ever wanted to easily run Windows applications & PC games on your Mac? Well, you can…and thanks to this Cult of Mac Deals offer you can do so at a price that makes choosing to do so a whole lot easier.

CrossOver 13 allows you to install Windows software right onto your Mac without a Windows license, without rebooting, and without a virtual machine. Your Windows applications and games integrate seamlessly on your Mac OS X and run alongside your other Mac applications. And Cult of Mac Deals has this revolutionary piece of software available for a limited time for just $29.99.

There are still a ton of us who game on our Macs. If you’re one of those folks, you’ll know how great a platform the Mac can be. While there may not be as overwhelming an amount of games on Apple’s fantastic computer platform, the ones that are there are of high quality.

And? There are a ton more these days than ever before. 2013 was a great year to be a Mac gamer, with ports of a ton of the big titles of the year, including games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Sim City, and Bioshock Infinite.

A bunch of iOS games came to the bigger screens of the Mac, too, with fantastic, hit titles like tower offense, Anomaly 2 and Solstice Arena, a speed massively online battle arena (MOBA) game from Zynga that has some legs, and some smaller indie gems like Gentlemen! from Lucky Frame.

Whether you like the big blockbuster games or the more cerebral indie ones, the Mac platform has a plethora of gaming experiences to choose from. Here are the best ones we’ve seen.

What do you get when you combine flying cities, re-fictionalized American history, an arsenal of weaponry, genetic engineering and quantum mechanics? One of the best games of 2013, that’s what.

If you haven’t played it by now, you owe it to yourself and your laptop to get BioShock: Infinite. It’s the perfect gift for yourself this holiday season – and you can get it right now from Cult of Mac Deals without putting a huge dent in your pocketbook, either. That’s because BioShock: Infinite is available for only $9.99 – a savings of 75% – during this special holiday promotion.

Look, gaming is a big thing, right? You can’t swing a dead cat in an ugly holiday sweater without hitting someone who’s busily involved in some kind of gaming screen these days, and iOS has the clear advantage with the hundreds of thousands of games on offer, all of which are fairly inexpensive or free to play.

We’ve taken some of the effort out of finding the best games of the past year, with this mega-list of over 20 iOS games (in no particular order) that you really should check out right away. Except where noted, all these games will work on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. Because, really, there’s no excuse for not making a game work universally these days.