Thank goodness for a game with just a few things to learn how to do.
Too many environmental puzzle games try to do too much, packing in all sorts of stuff you have to figure out to solve the ever-increasingly difficult levels.
Not so with Kiwanuka, an elegantly smart game that only has a couple of mechanics, but tons of fun levels to solve with them.
Oh, and it’s a little bit weird, too.
Wingsuit Cute is a game about a bunch of adorable animals forced to glide through the air and collect snacks while under the constant threat of smashing their widdle snoots on rocks and trees.
It really downplays the animals graphically smashing their faces open, but that’s basically what’s happening. The game takes a sunnier approach, choosing to focus on the part where tiny mammals don wingsuits in search of thrills and noms. And it’s really cute. And kinda fun, with a fair amount of challenge to keep perfect-run seekers coming back.
But it’s mostly cute.
Angry Birds is coming to a big screen near you. Rovio Entertainment is taking the epic battle of birds-versus-pigs from your iPhone to the cinema, in 3-D, and launching it into the wide, wide world in July 2016.
We’re aflutter with anticipation: Can they actually make a movie based on a video game worth watching? It’s happened time and time again that our favorite living room brain-cell killer was transported to the land of plush seats and buttery popcorn only to disappoint.
Most video games turn into celluloid duds even though we stupidly paid to see them; Rotten Tomatoes gives Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within only a 44 percent approval rating. The rest go down from there.
In the gallery above, you’ll find a brutal rundown of the best of the worst video game-cum-movies that Rovio should watch — as a reminder of what not to do.
If you’ve ever wanted to tap nervously on the screen, listen to repetitive dubstep, and watch colorful pills fall in front of your eyes, now there’s an app for that. Intake: Be Aggressive is a self-described “psychedelic shooter” for iPad that carelessly toys with the concept of club drugs, but without the trippy fun.
I expected more from Cipher Prime Studios, the makers of Splice: Tree of Life and Pulse: Volume One. Intake: Be Aggressive is a very simple tapping game where two different colors of pills fall from the top of the screen, and your job is to tap on them to chain together a combo. You can tap the space at the very bottom to switch colors and prevent the chain from breaking.
Saunter up to the bar, pardner, and we’ll tell you all about our little town here.
We need a sheriff around these parts and you look like you’d fit the badge nicely. Here’s a gun; get out there and collect rewards, shoot wild animals and round up the bad guys.
Oh, and don’t mind the funny green light ’round these parts. It’s just how we get things done.
Once again, I’m here to tell you about a little minimalist game that has completely kicked my ass.
It’s called Lumena, and it doesn’t look like much until you play it and fail in like two seconds. And then you try again, and again you fail because the game is, in fact, so minimal that it doesn’t even bother to tell you how to play it. But after a while, you figure it out (it’s not really that complicated), and with newly found confidence, you give it another shot. And you lose in five seconds.
But stick with it because it’s way better than I’m making it sound.
Don’t Starve is a brilliant yet brutal video game that will not hold your hand as it leads you inexorably toward a messy, starving death.
Until now, it’s been a single-player affair, which just reinforces the theme of loneliness present in every ticking second of each of the in-game days and nights.
Klei Entertainment, at the frantic urging of its fan base, is finally bringing a final feature to the game that we all wanted: a shared experience.
This summer, we can huddle together with other players, avoiding the rampaging hounds of doom and giant tree monsters bent on our destruction in ecstatic togetherness.
I’ve been playing video games for almost 30 years. I like to think that I’ve developed a certain level of hand-eye coordination and an ability to recognize patterns and learn rules reasonably quickly.
But Spirit Run: Fire vs. Ice, a new endless runner from developer Lunagames, made me question all of that. Suddenly, I was transforming when I wanted to jump, and jumping when I wanted to slide, and just falling the hell off of things that I normally wouldn’t.
That isn’t to say that it’s a bad game; it’s actually quite good. But be prepared to feel like a monkey trying to do algebra. You know, if that’s a thing that one might call upon monkeys to do.
Leo’s Fortune is one of those games that just makes you feel good.
It definitely gave Apple the warm fuzzies: they chose the game,
Still reeling from the breakout success of the $4.99 game, designer Anders Hejdenberg spoke about the origins of Leo’s Fortune, why passion projects are best, how market research ruins creativity, and the reason the best teams are small ones. He also gave us exclusive access to pictures showing the game’s journey from page to iOS screen.
Want to find out more? In true platformer style, there’s more after the jump…
If making money is what you like to do then the new app Make It Rain is just for you. Players can swipe their fingers across the screen to simply throw dollar bills from their bands, but making more money is where strategy comes into play. From business to political investments, build lemonade stands, hire politicians and much more to upgrade your benefits. How much money do you think you can make?
Take a look at the video to see what you think.
Imagine a game that mashes up the best of a classic strategy game like speed chess and a modern hit like League of Legends. If you do, you’ll probably come up with something like Aerena: Clash of Champions, a steampunk-themed turn-based strategy game that uses the hero mechanics of other massively online battle arena games like Dota 2 in a painstakingly created digital board game arena.
The game will go free-to-play this Wednesday on Steam (it’s already out for Android tablets — iOS versions to come soon), and is a great new gaming experience — we’ve been playing it all morning. It takes only a short while for the casual gamer to learn how to play, but there is enough strategy and balanced mechanics to give core players a ton of depth.
If you’re super savvy, though, you’ll grab the early access copy today for $10, which nets you a full $30 worth of downloadable content, extra heroes and more. Either way, Aerena is a brilliant game and deserves your attention.
Ubisoft’s upcoming Watch Dogs console game is hoping to upend the traditional boundaries between single- and multi-player gaming, allowing you to hack into other players’ games on the fly, earning experience and renown points which you can then use to level up your own character’s skill levels.
The game was a huge surprise at last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), and has since been getting a ton of attention from gamers and the press as the May 27 release date looms.
Even better, you’ll be able to interact with the very same game and players via a free mobile app, letting you increase the heat on rogue players, as you can see in this fairly long and detailed play through video below. Sure, the video is ridiculously longer than most gamer’s attention spans, but it’s well worth a look.
Here’s yet another artsy, minimalist puzzle game you’ll want to check out.
Bicolor gives you some colored blocks with numbers on them, and your job is to swipe them around to make the entire screen a single color. It sounds easy — and it typically is, if I’m honest — but it has moments of beauty and elegance that make you forget that it isn’t challenging you. And it’s fun enough without the head-scratching because, like all minimalist puzzle games, it’s about calm, man.
And as long as you keep that in mind, the two of you will get along just fine.
If you’re looking to get away from it all, you might want to check out this game. …and then it rained is an arcade game full of sound, rain, and colors, and it’s the perfect game for a quiet few minutes away from the hectic pace of your life.
With true zen-like minimalism, there are just a few simple mechanics at work here, but it may just be the best game you play all week.
Check out the video below to see how it plays.
Great games don’t always need amazing graphics and sound, but they do need a strong premise and a lot of heart. A Dark Room, an outstanding text-based adventure game with minimal graphics, starts off as a simple survival story and eventually blossoms into a full-on Fallout-style role-playing game (RPG).
Much of the joy of playing A Dark Room is watching it unfold in surprising new ways. The game starts simply — you’re alone in the dark with a single button to press to start a fire. Eventually, new buttons appear so you can perform actions like collecting wood, and a character called the Builder shows up to help you form a shelter.
When you first start playing Hill Runner, it seems impossible. And then after a few dozen dismal failures, you have a really good run and restore your faith in yourself. And then you’ll mess up the next try immediately.
It’s a glass case of emotion, this game.
But it’s very simple, and it’s free, and it’ll offer some distraction and charm for a few minutes if that’s all you’re looking for.
New game Mutants: Genetic Gladiators aims to be your go-to when you want to battle it out with comic book-style monsters that you mutate and create yourself.
The game, from French publisher Kojobo, originated on Facebook, gathering almost 6 million players with a turn-based arena battling scheme that mixes role-playing level-up mechanics with an interesting combat system that uses various monster “genes” to add to the strategy. You’ll choose three mutant gladiators for your battle team, and then pit them against other teams — both AI-controlled and actual other players — for ultimate supremacy.
Check out the launch trailer below for some hot comic-book creature battling action.
Two coders who’ve never met sat in their respective man caves 1,400 miles apart making a game that proves once and for all that whiz-bang graphics aren’t necessary when it comes to building a hit.
Called A Dark Room, their “minimalist text adventure” has stormed the App Store — averaging 10,000 downloads a day (at $0.99 a pop) and currently holding the No. 1 position for paid iPhone games (see our review here).
Here’s how Michael Townsend and Amir Rajan created an indie iOS game with no graphics that became the most unlikely success of the year.
Ever since Disney revealed its grand Infinity gaming universe, we’ve been wondering when Marvel-themed playsets would arrive — or even if they would. Disney bought Marvel in 2009, and it made sense the characters would show up: Infinity would be the perfect setting to flaunt the newly subsumed superheroes. Problem was, nary a whiff of Marvel could be found at Infinity’s January 2013 launch.
Nevertheless, Thor, Iron Man, Black Widow and the gang are coming to Disney Infinity — and boy do they look awesome.
Of course you have the Nintendo 3DS in your bag — it’s an outstanding handheld gaming system with a bevy of first- and third-party game titles that range from the strategic to the evocative.
You know the device is capable of some brilliant gaming for adults, but good lord, Nintendo, could you maybe bypass the primary colors? Maybe offer, say, a black version? Something in gold, maybe? The sophisticated folks at Waterfield know that you’re a grownup now, so they’ve created the City Slicker, a lush cocoon of a 3DS and 3DS XL case with a proper leather flap that ages along with you.
I like words. I like writing them, I like spelling them, and I like picking the perfect one for the sentence I’m creating. And I like playing with them, too, if you couldn’t tell from all the word games I choose for reviews.
But even if you aren’t a Word Nerd like I am, you’ll probably enjoy Fiasco. It’s a moderately paced competitive spelling game in which you create as many words of three or more letters as you can by dropping tiles, Tetris-style, onto a board.
You can get time and point bonuses for longer words, which is basically the only way to win. Because this game is pretty challenging.
Sid Meier’s Civilization V is the best “4X” (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate) game out there, and it can be yours for 67 percent off the regular price of thirty bucks right now in this exclusive to Cult of Mac offer from publisher Aspyr.
Civ 5, as it’s colloquially known, is the distillation of all that is good about the $x genre, which is why the game received universal acclaim and a score of 90/100 on review aggregator site Metacritic.
Aspyr wanted to find a way to acknowledge the support of Cult of Mac readers.
“It’s an exclusive deal for Cult of Mac readers on one of our most beloved titles,” said Aspyr’s Michael Blair. “This is a big ‘thank you’ to the Cult of Mac readers and to Cult of Mac for covering Mac gaming!”
You may not need a mouse much these days if you’re rocking a Macbook or Magic Trackpad, but if you do any kind of gaming on your computer, you know a mouse is essential kit.
Pro gamers rely on lag-free, incredibly high-tech controllers and gaming mice, and Steel Series is one of the top contenders in the field. Their series of gaming mice and keyboards are precision engineered to provide whip-fast response to any twitchy input a gamer needs in their chosen gaming environment.
The Steel Series Sensei wireless gaming mouse is an ergonomic marvel with ten buttons, its own software control app and some scary-quick response times.
Despite all that high-tech nonsense, it’s super easy to use and feels good in the hand. Which is important when I’m jacked into an all-night MMO session with 12 of my besties, raiding the lair of whatever monster it is that we’re all trying to kill.
I love this damn mouse more than I can say.
Every once in a while, something drops into the App Store that makes my Grinch heart grow three sizes. So after I take the pills my doctor gave me to keep me from dying when that happens, I spend some time with the game and see if it’s any good. And this one, which a 7-year-old boy designed, is actually pretty fun.
Greedy Ladder is a new free-to-play game in which you play as one of eight boys or girls (the differences are cosmetic) climbing a ridiculously tall ladder in one of six major cities. It’s a racing game: The goal is to reach the top as quickly as possible while eating healthy foods that will speed you up and avoiding junk food and inedible objects that slow you down.
All proceeds from the game go to charity, apparently, so that’s pretty cute, too.
While many are sure to remember the old hit-game Fruit Ninja, not many are still playing it. Though the slicing mania may be on halt in one app, Apple’s current app of the week KingHunt aims to keep you going at it. Claiming to be the next generation of the slicing game genre, slice your way through crazy objects and plenty of fun-filled levels. Do you think you can become the ultimate hunter?
Take a look at the video and see what you think.