games - page 46

The famous Square Enix tax, defined as the premium price the Japanese video game company has always charged for its ports of classic and new RPG games on the iTunes App Store, seems to be up–for a while, at least.

We’re talking huge discounts, like recently released Deus Ex: The Fall, originally debuting at seven bucks, now only $0.99, and The World Ends With You (perhaps my favorite Square Enix game of all time) at half the regular $20 price.

How about Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II, classics in the role playing game genre, at half off, each going for $3.99 on the App Store? There are eight other Final Fantasy titles on sale, as well. Yeah, I thought you’d like that.

Sure, The Room Two is a sequel to Fireproof Games’ original effort, The Room, but more of the same, with bigger and better puzzles is most definitely not the worst thing in the world.

Check out our video of the tutorial level of The Room Two below to get a sense of the game, and decide whether you’ll want to purchase the game right away.

Wait, what am I saying? Of course you’re going to want to.

Aspyr has figured out how to shrink an entire galaxy (one far, far away, of course) onto the iPhone and iPod; all the Wookies, Jawas, Jedis, Tusken Raiders and bounty hunters — all now made tinier as Aspyr updates the previously iPad-only Knights of the Old Republic as a Universal App.

To celebrate this feat of quantum mechanics (or simple coding, your pick) Aspyr has slashed the app’s price in half, from $10 to $5.

Old people probably remember Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, a game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System about Little Mac, a tiny boxer rising through the ranks by defeating opponents so much larger that they look like they could swallow Mac whole with very little difficulty.

It’s an underdog story that owed a lot to films like Rocky and The Karate Kid — movies that helped to create that most honored of sports-story traditions: the training montage.

Endless Boss Fight, a new free-to-play game from developer White Milk Studios, is basically a perpetual game version of those montages.

Australian-based developer Halfbrick is at it again, with free-to-play Colossatron: Massive World Threat, now available around the globe.

You’ll take on the role of the humungous mechanical robot Colossatron on your quest to utterly destroy city after city, using various colored robotic modules to give your wanton destruction just a little extra oomph.

Yeah, color-matching doesn’t sound that fun, but this one? It really is.

The Colossatron is a mysterious, robotic dragon-thing that drops out of space specifically to destroy cities. Nobody knows what it is or where it came from; all we know is that it must be destroyed before it destroys us.

Nobody even knows how to control it, and that includes anyone playing the game.

Colossatron: Massive World Threat is the latest from Jetpack Joyride developer Halfbrick, and it’s the studio’s most esoteric title yet. And this is the team that also made a game about chopping fruit while avoiding bombs that, while possessing fuses, apparently only explode if they get cut.

So, yeah. It’s even weirder than that.

First announced last week, Chair Entertainment’s incredible hack-and-slash game Infinity Blade III has received a massive update today, adding 3 new quests, 9 new enemies, new modes, skills, goals, potions, gems, and more to an already feature-packed game.

The new Walking Dead: The Game Trailer looks creepy as hell.

It’s been a year since Telltale’s first Walking Dead game came out and scared the crap out of all of us. Now Telltale has just released the first episode of the second season, titled appropriately enough The Walking Dead: Season Two.

Check out the trailer (rated M) below.

That headline isn’t hyperbole. I’ve started this review three times, but I kept thinking of things I should “check out” in the game so that I could make sure I was writing the thing properly. But mainly, I just wanted to keep playing the new Adventure Time version of Ski Safari.

If you haven’t played the original, it’s a twist on the endless runner genre: The endless skier. The hapless hero has to give it all he has to outrun an avalanche that is barreling down the hill behind him. He can do backflips for points and can hitch rides on the local wildlife for speed boosts, and all the while, he’s collecting as many coins as he can.

Ski Safari: Adventure Time is the same thing only with 100 percent fewer skis and way more characters from Pendleton Ward’s awesome cartoon series. So basically, it’s better in every way.

Once the king of mobile gaming, over the past few years, Nintendo has found itself caught flatfooted by the rise of smartphones. Although the company’s 3DS portable game console can’t be said to be a total flop, it’s certainly not selling in gangbuster units compared to previous consoles, like the DS or Gameboy. The reason why is simple: most people have a perfectly good gaming device in their pockets all the time now in the form of their smartphone, and don’t want to have to carry around (let alone buy) an entirely separate device dedicated to gaming.

Many critics have suggested that it’s time for Nintendo to give up and just start releasing games based on its prize characters such as Mario or Link as iOS apps. Such advice is short-sighted, but that doesn’t mean Nintendo can’t be better leveraging Apple’s iOS platform… which is exactly what the Big N seems to have in mind.

Alright, so they’re the “AntiSquad” because they’re a ragtag bunch of misfits with little in common who still manage to pull together and get the job done when it counts. But sometimes headlines are hard.

AntiSquad is a new tactical game with a cartoonish art style and a whole lot of things to tap on. If you’ve played games like Breach & Clear or Final Fantasy Tactics, you get the general idea: Your group and the enemy take turns moving across a map trying to get into position to attack or outmaneuver each other. You have grids and buffs and cooldowns and all that other genre-standard stuff.

And other than its cool art, “genre-standard” is the best way I can think of to describe this game.

Square Enix announced Tuesday the release of the very first Tomb Raider, the initial game in a long-running franchise that has spawned sequels across console platforms, PC, the Mac, and even a couple of movies.

The release today to the iPhone and iPad is a direct port of the original game, complete with charming old school graphics and gameplay. And buttons. Lots of crappy virtual onscreen buttons.

Even though there are a ton of games out there that have refined this type of gameplay that you can get for a similar price, you’ll surely get to see where this popular genre got its start.

Czech Republic-based Madfinger Games just released a huge update for Dead Trigger 2 on the iTunes App Store and Google Play, just two months after its initial release.

The first person zombie shooter already has over 10 million downloads, and this massive Christmas update, with its new additions and added zombie-killing gadgets, will nearly double the game content for all.

In addition, the Madfinger team has updated the original Dead Trigger with support for new devices so even more folks can join in on the fun.

The inevitable fate of all popular mascots to eventually end up in a go kart. Take a look at Mario, Crash Bandicoot, Sonic, and many other iconic video game mascot characters and you’ll find they’ve all squished themselves into a car at some point. Well, now the Angry Birds are, too.

Angry Birds Go is a free-to-play karting adventure full of repetition and cool-down meters. Unlocking aesthetically pleasing carts means putting in real money, and your spirited birdy racers get tired after a short while. Beyond that, Go is a completely average racer.

I don’t know why characters in endless runner games are always in such a big hurry.

Sure, Runbot was fleeing the secret lab that created him. And the guy in Temple Run has that whole “killer demon monkeys” thing going on, so he’s cool.

But Rez, the hero of the new endless runner Galaxy Run, is just headed home. Why’s he gotta be Mr. Perpetual Motion all the time? It just gets him killed a lot.

Looking at the Facebook Games Of The Year list, it’s pretty clear what Facebook gamers enjoy. A majority of the 22 titles are casual, with hits like Candy Crush and Farmville 2. One comment heard around the Cult of Mac writer’s room was, “Who’s ever heard of these games?”

The one game that stands out is Disruptor Beam’s Game of Thrones Ascent, a fairly mid-core gaming title. We asked Jon Radoff, CEO and founder of Disruptor Beam, how it feels to rise to the top of Facebook’s casual-game environment.

“I think Facebook wanted to develop a list that contains some of the most popular games in the world (like Candy Crush) but they also made an effort to include innovative and more unique games,” Radoff told Cult of Mac by email. “Game of Thrones Ascent stands out among the games because we created something new: a story-driven strategy game, which nobody knew would work on Facebook until we tried.”

Yes, the beatings and bright lights of GTA: San Andreas have finally been squeezed onto iPad and iPhone screens. But that’s not the only good news this week regarding iOS ports of big-name classics.

Transport Tycoon, an elegant SimCity-like game that focuses on planning, constructing and managing a transportation empire, has just released a free version of its iOS port, which was originally released at the end of October.

In my review of The Room a few months ago, I said it was the best mobile game I’ve ever played, and I meant it. The Room 2, the iPad-only sequel to the puzzle-box escape title, is out now, and it’s more of the same.

And I have absolutely no problem with that.

It’s really good. It’s really, really good. If you played the first one, you should play this one immediately. And if you didn’t play the first one, you should play it, and then you should play this one, and then you’ll be all set.

So, yes. You could say I am a fan.

It’s not just the incredible graphics and great gameplay that keeps people coming back to Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade games, it’s the constant updates, and hot on the heels of the announcement of a weird Keanu Reeves-centric game event comes word of a big new update.

Coming on December 19th, the ‘Ausar Rising’ update will explore the origins of the Infinity Blade protagonist, as well as allow you to revisit the original Infinity Blade castle.

Mojang’s Minecraft is one of the best games on the Mac, but the iPhone and iPad version has always been slightly behind when it comes to features. But with its latest update, the biggest yet, Minecraft – Pocket Edition is catching up, adding some of Minecraft’s best features, including the ability to make roller coasters with minecars and rails!

If you’ve never given the classic Fallout games a try, now’s your chance. GoG.com is giving three of them away for free for 48 hours, as part of the classic games digital distributor’s Winter Sale for 2013.

You can get the Mac version of Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics for free until Friday, December 12, so get on it now.

The Room Two launched today on the iTunes App Store. As the sequel to Apple’s 2012 Game Of The Year (The Room), it has a lot to live up to.

Our reviewer called it a “must download” game, and we picked the original locked box puzzle game as an iOS Game of the Week.

The Room Two promises more of the same, and that’s not a bad thing. Developer Fireproof Games found the perfect mix of eye candy, just-tough-enough puzzle solving, and a haunting soundtrack in the first game, so any more of that is extremely welcome.

Making your own beer is hard work. It’s a series of intensive scientific processes, and a mistake at any one of them can ruin hours of work and possibly poison someone. But if you get it right, it’s a middle finger right to the face of Big Beer.

Is “Big Beer” a thing? I’ve lost track of which corporations are evil.

Fiz is an independent management game about independent brewing, and it tasks you with building up your own brand from the garage up. And that’s every bit as complicated as it sounds. More so, actually, because numbers are also involved.

Prepare to take a trip to a dimpled, plastic galaxy far, far away. Warner Bros. has just released LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga to the iOS App Store. And even better, they finally figured out something to do with the Phantom Menace!

The first time I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was over ten years ago, and if you told me that one day, I would be able to play this massive 70+ hour open-ended carnage simulator, not on a bulky console, but a device thinner than a pack of cards I could fit into my pocket, I would have told you you were mad. Yet here we are, as Rockstar Games has released San Andreas to the iOS App Store.