games - page 56

My kids and I have been watching episodes of Adventure Time, Cartoon Network’s disturbingly funny cartoon show. The adventures of Finn, Jake and a cast of crazy characters is compelling television, and hilarious on many different levels.

Legends of Ooo – Adventure Time originally launched for iOS last year in June, and while it provided some of the same fun and voiceover work as the cartoon show in a goofy little iOS package, it only came with one episode, “The Big Hollow Princess.”

This oversight has been corrected this past weekend with the release of the second episode, “The Library of Doom,” an all-new story and adventure game with new voice overs for the characters within. Even better, Episode 2 is absolutely free for a limited time as an in-app purchase. Shmow-zow!

If you haven’t gotten to check out The World Ends With You: Solo Remix yet, it’s completely understandable. Publisher Square Enix has a reputation for charging much more than the typical iOS game when it releases its popular games onto Apple’s touchscreen platform. It totally makes sense you might not want to pick it up for $17.99 for your iPhone, let alone $19.99 for your iPad.

If I said that the game, originally released to the dual-screen Nintendo DS, is completely worth every penny of the asking price, would you pick it up? Probably not.

But what if I said that both versions are now much less expensive, with the iPhone version in the App Store at $9.99 and the iPad version at $10.99? If you love innovative, brilliant gaming on the go, you’ll go grab a copy right now. Who knows how long the sale will last?

Adventure games are fantastic fun, but they tend to be a bit outdated. Even the newer ones seem to think that hunting for tiny little pixels in confusing images and combining bizarre objects together is the way to go.

Brazillian developer Pigasus Games thinks it’s high time we play adventure games that don’t force us to bend our minds to the will of some wacky game developer’s specific puzzles, but rather play something that combines emergent gameplay with a whole sandbox of tools to create our own adventure games. So they created Adventurezator, an emergent point-and-click adventure game with its own set of design and creation tools, made in Unity for Mac, PC, and Linux. Here’s what the devs have to say:

In Adventurezator, you not only play an ever-renewed pile of brilliantly designed point-and-click adventures: you actually get to design your own, and publish them too! The best part? You can do that without all that boring programming, or math. It’s all very technical, but (if we had to put it in layman’s terms) it works like a very fancy cable connected directly to your brilliance.

In the film The Nines, Ryan Reynolds’ writer character uses gaming as a means to get away from the rigors of writing…and I do the same.

One thing that has always fascinated me about gaming isn’t so much the playing of games, but the creation of games. But I’m a storyteller and not a coder, so I’ve left my ideas for stories that could be built into a game environment either unwritten or put to page or screen to read instead.

Double Fine’s Brütal Legend is out on the Mac App Store, and to celebrate, the publisher has dropped the price to a mere ten bucks. Considering that this game still retails for $15-$20 online, at least, this is a great deal.

Did I mention it also has Jack Black, Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Lita Ford, and an extra-helping of metalhead charm and Double Fine humor? Well, it does. If you’ve got a spare ten to, well, spare, then you should head on over to the Mac App Store and get yourself a copy before the price goes back up.

I play a lot of iOS games on iPhone and iPad. There are so many games out there, so much content, that it can be extremely difficult to find something you’ll like without having to download a ton of apps, try them out, and then discard them as they don’t quite scratch the itch you’re needing, well, scratched.

Free apps or paid apps, both cost something to download in time, cash, or both. So, I figured, why not start doing some of the heavy lifting here, and help you find fantastic games to play, without all the work?

That said, I found a gem of a game this week, and it’s only $0.99, with no further in-app purchases (IAP) to sully the experience. Blitz Block Robo is a fantastic little game that hits all the right notes.

Let’s get this out of the way right up front, ok? Scattered Entertainment’s The Drowning is a drop-dead gorgeous free-to-play game with a well-designed control scheme that (almost) makes playing a first-person shooter (FPS) worthwhile on a touchscreen. This is, in fact, an important release for those three facts alone.

Ultimately, though, the game suffers as a direct result, I think, of these very same features. I went into the game expecting to find at least some console-level depth in storyline, level design, and the like. What I found, however, was much less interesting.

Minigore 2: Zombies, the wonderful dual-stick shooter from Mountain Sheep, is now free for a limited time to celebrate Minigore’s fourth anniversary. It’s arguably one of Mountain Sheep’s most enjoyable titles on iOS, and that’s saying a lot when you consider the same studio is also responsible for Bike Baron and Ice Rage.

One of the finer console ports to date, XCOM: Enemy Unknown has been raising expectations of mobile gamers since its release last month. It’s almost the exact same game as its Mac, PC, and console versions, bringing deep strategic gameplay and a brilliantly conceived science fictional world to the iOS platform.

Today, though, XCOM: Enemy Unknown got an update, and a bit of a price drop. It’s now $14.99, down from $19.99, and has a whole new way to play: Second Wave.

Already explored all of Rapture on your Mac? Gear up, soldier. It’s time to soar up to the air city Columbia in Irrational Games’s incredible, award-winning sequel to the Bioshock series, Bioshock Infinite. It’s coming to the Mac App Store at the end of the month.

Two guys named Mike met up on the TouchArcade forums a few years back and bonded over their love of retro platform games with a hook. A literal hook, to be specific.

Mike Meade and Mike Gaughen competed with each other to see who was the best Hook Champ player, moving on to challenge each other over Super QuickHook. When those speed runs came to an end, the two Mikes decided to make their own hooking endless runner, and Mikey Shorts, an App Store Best of 2012, was born.

On Thursday, August 8, the long-awaited sequel is set to release in the App Store. Mikey Hooks aims to be everything Mikey Shorts was and more, with a host of new ideas and features to keep us all jumping and hooking our way to joy.

Released last month, Kingdom Rush: Frontiers is the followup to the critically-acclaimed Kingdom Rush, one of my personal favorites in the Tower Defense genre, what with its cute little hand-drawn characters, wacky sense of humor, and some of the most finely-tuned tower defense levels I’ve ever played.

Kindgom Rush: Frontiers, then, just got a marine-flavored update today with six new nautical-themed creeps to defend against, two new heroes to deploy when things get rough, and some extra maps and achievements to keep you entertained far beyond the already stellar gameplay of the original release.

Video games are often praised right out of the gate due to their amazing graphical fidelity and smooth animation. A less visible but equally important feature of any game, especially in the realm of first-person shooters, is the control scheme.

DeNA / Mobage’s The Drowning, out today as a universal iOS app, has seemingly nailed both of these things in a game that’s taking the iOS gaming world by storm. And perhaps shotgun.

The developer behind incredibly successful free to play iOS game, Puzzles & Dragons, is back with a new free to play title called Freak Tower.

Launching the game for the first time allows prospective tower builders to walk through a tutorial that gives a decent overview of the game. The idea here is to build a tower, one floor up at a time, and fight off various monsters that climb said tower to steal the food that’s dubiously placed on the roof.

Id Software’s seminal first-person shooter franchise, Doom, came to the iOS platform back in 2009, with Doom Classic. It debuted as a $6.99 game, and we were all willing to pay for admission to a game that stole our hearts (and our free time) as young gamers.

About a year later, Doom II RPG showed up on the App Store at $3.99. It’s the sequel to 2005’s Doom RPG, a turn-based, more strategic take on the Doom universe.

Both titles are a part of gaming history, and they’re both available for $0.99 on the app store today. How long will they stay at this low price? Who knows? Not us.

Rovio’s point and click puzzler, Tiny Thief, has just dropped in price from $2.99 to $0.99. That’s not a bad discount, and it’s happening right now for we don’t know how long.

It just might be time to jump on this one, then, as Tiny Thief is a great game.

Who better to star in the world’s most famous endless runner than the world’s fastest runner? That’s Imangi Studios’ latest stroke of genius: they’re now offering Olympic world record runner Usain Bolt, that stroke of greased lightning himself, as a playable character in Temple Run 2.

This story-based science fiction game for the iPad comes from Giant Spacekat is looking really good, what with its Mass Effect-style choice-making, all female cast, and real-time combat system. The team is so excited, in fact, that they’ve started up a Kickstarter project to polish it up as well as bring it to Mac and PC. [UPDATE: The Revolution 60 folks emailed us to say that the initial funds will go to porting to PC, while a $10,000 will help ensure a Mac version. They apologize for any confusion.]

With 29 days left to go, the project has already raised over $2,700 toward the $5,000 goal, so chances are good for success.

Elevens is a solitaire card game in which players lay down cards, face-up and in a grid of 3X3. They then remove the cards in groups when they add up to eleven, and go until they can go no more.

Cassandra’s 11 is based on this game, in that you must tap cards from a grid when they add up to eleven. Tap a Nine and Two card, for example, or a Five, a Four, and a Two. What takes this universal app from developer Plexonic to the next level is the puzzle aspect.

If you haven’t gotten enough zombie survival horror action on your iPhone or iPad, here’s some great news for you: 2013 Infected Wars is a new entry to the genre, and it uses Epic’s gorgeous Unreal Engine for mobile to bring you what looks to be a solid 3D third-person zombie shooter with all the trimmings.

In what may be a first for a mobile game, 2013 Infected Wars developer, Action Mobile Games, is promising co-op multiplayer for the full story campaign, which could be a great way to get with your sisters and bros and just mow down the reanimated undead.

Check out the gameplay trailer below to see what we mean.

This frantic, wacky 2D endless runner from Illinois-based development studio High Voltage Games (Zoombies, The Conduit HD) has just been chosen as the iTunes App Store’s Free App of the Week. To celebrate, Le Vamp is now completely free to download and try out for the next few days.

Hurry, though, the special offer only lasts through August 1 at 11 pm Central US time.

Out today, TurtleStrike brings iOS and Android gamers a new, turn-based strategy game with over 80,000 combinations of weaponized, armored turtle warfare. You’ll get Tesla coils and kamikaze turtles, a missile named Big Bertha, and the chance to compete in tournaments that have real monetary rewards.

Sound like fun? You bet your shell it does.

You may know that Starbucks, perhaps the most ubiquitous coffee shop in the US and beyond, gives out free iTunes stuff each week. Sometimes it’s songs, sometimes TV show episodes, and sometimes Apps.

This week, Starbucks is giving away Cyto’s Puzzle Adventure, a cute little regularly $0.99 game that sees you flinging a little cell-like organism around a beautiful, organic-looking playing field to recover his memories.

Room 8, the game’s developer, sent us an email to let us know.

KING Art and Nordic Games just released a brand new, gorgeous point and click adventure game, The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief to Mac, PC, and Linux via the Steam or Nordic Games shop in both Standard and Deluxe editions. The game will also come to PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade later this summer.

The first of three chapters, The Eye of the Sphinx, is now ready for download on either distribution platform, and is even 10 percent off as a launch special through the 30th of July.

Auroch Digital just announced the development of a digital version of a classic Games Workshop board game from 1987, Chainsaw Warrior, coming to iPad and Android soon.

The original board game is one of the only single-player board games I know of, putting you in the role of the only hope for humanity as scary creatures come flooding through a dimensional rift in the heart of Manhattan, circa 2032. Of course, you’re the guy that must come out of retirement to battle the evil monsters, which have already destroyed the world’s bravest and brightest. It’s up to you to chainsaw your way through wave after wave the evil hordes. Wait, that sounds like a video game, doesn’t it?