gaming - page 17

Editor’s Note: Due to the sheer size of Elder Scrolls Online, we’re publishing our hands-on impressions in three chunks. Here’s part one.

I dash up a sandy dune, rushing past palm trees, looking for the spot on my map where an eyeball icon beckons my attention. The sky is blue — it’s mid-day here in the Hammerfell region — with a few clouds to tease the eye. It’s hot enough to fry an egg on my heavy armor, but hey, I’m not really running anywhere.

As I crest the little hill, a brilliant lens-flare from the sun draws my attention skyward, distracting me from the broken bridge. I tumble heavily to the sea below, splashing into the water.

I’m in good company: there’s a small school of orcs and elves who have made the same rookie mistake. We make the slow swim of shame to the sandy beach, then rush off to explore this idyllic, if tricky, land.

This all takes place on the continent of Tamriel, which will be familiar to gamers who’ve played the previous titles in the series: Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind. It’s like Middle Earth for game nerds. While each of the previous games took place in just one area of Tamriel, the Elder Scrolls online promises the whole land mass.

It’s paradise –I wonder if I can bring my kids with me when I move here.

New York is known for its architectural beauty and intense surroundings. With so many buildings, lights and more there is plenty of action to take place. In the new app Skyline Skaters you can become a part of that action, as you skate from the authorities jumping from roof to roof. Grind on railings, hop over rockets and so much more. How far do you think you can make it before you get caught in this new addition to the endless runner genre?

Take a look at the video and find out what you think.

Here’s yet another retro-style arcade shooter you might want to check out.

Hectic Space is as pared down as you can get. It’s just your ship, a bunch of nasty enemies, and one simple control. You can only move up and down, so you can just drag anywhere on the screen to line up your shots, avoid the bad guys, and grab power-ups. But it’s not so bare-bones that the screen isn’t always full of … just … stuff.

Crazy stuff. All the stuff, basically. It’s nuts.

Princess Ida needs to find herself, and she’s doing so with a quest across an unpredictable and shifting landscape that takes inspiration from perspective-bending Escher art and hit indie game Fez.

You’ll need to tap on the screen to get Ida moving to her end goal, swiping and rotating dozens of different mechanical gadgets to make sure she can continue on her way. The puzzles aren’t super difficult, but they do require a bit of thought, and plenty of them are downright ingenious. You’ll feel pretty darn intelligent when you finally get that “aha!” moment.

Check out our play-through video below to get a sense of how lush and calming Monument Valley really is.

Talk of the popular app Flappy Bird has still seemed to be far from fading out. As developers everywhere continue to fuel the craze with remakes and clones, players everywhere have seemed to grow bored of many new app store releases. Although in spite of common trends, some developers have managed to channel the joys of Flappy Bird into their own creations. The new app Lightspeed Hero is one of the latest releases to do this. Avoid asteroids for as long as you can and see how far you can make it without crashing your spaceship. Just how long do you think you can last before game-over?

Take a look at the video and find out what you think.

This is a Cult of Mac video review of the multi-platform application Lightspeed Hero – Squideo Games, brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.

15 Coins is hard. Alright, that was the shortest review I’ve ever written. I’ll be back Monday.

Apparently, my editor refuses to pay me for three sentences, so I guess I’ll elaborate.

15 Coins is an arcade avoidance game where you’re trying to collect the eponymous pick-ups before you run into a past version of yourself and explode. Probably because of a paradox or whatever happened to Ron Silver at the end of Timecop. Actually, I think the game calls your pursuers “drones,” but they look like you and follow the same path you did, so I’m just going to go ahead and call time travel on this one. The point is that it’s difficult.

Imagine slapping your nightstand to snooze your iPhone’s alarm. Or rapping on the kitchen countertop to flip recipe book pages so your flour-coated hands don’t mess up the iPad’s screen. These scenarios could soon be real: XTouch is a new technology that essentially turns any solid surface into an input device for an iPad or iPhone.

Borderlands 2. BioShock Infinite. Civilization V. Just a few of the AAA titles hit with deep discounts at Aspyr’s GameAgent game store as the platform celebrates reaching 100,000 members. How deep? All the above-mentioned titles can be had at 75 percent off. Even non-Aspyr titles like Napoleon: Total War and XCOM: Enemy Unknown will be discounted, though at only (only!) half-off.

Sure, we all love a good game of Civilization V, but we also all know that the epic turn-based strategy can really suck up our time.

That’s one of the reasons we’re so excited about Hero Generations, a Rogue-like strategy game with a unique, personal question at its core: what will you do with the limited time you have left?

You’ll have plenty of choices, but your character will age one year for each turn in the game. If you want to truly influence the kingdom, you’ll need to find a mate, settle down, and have a child.

Your offspring, then, becomes the next controllable character in the game, with all the experience and items that you amassed before you died.

If that doesn’t intrigue you, I’m not sure what will.

When in a rush it can be easy to misplace something important. Next thing you know you’re looking everywhere trying to spot what you’ve lost. In the app What’s The Difference the objective is to spot five differences between two like pictures. Can you beat all levels and spot all differences before time runs out?

Take a look at the video and find out what you think.

This is a Cult of Mac video review of the iOS application What’s the Difference? ~ spot the hidden objects in this photo puzzle hunt! – Candywriter, LLC, brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.

Monument Valley is what would happen if Fez and The Room (the game, not the movie) took place inside of M.C. Escher’s sketchbook.

It has a vibrant, interesting world full of impossible geometry, mysterious accusers, and bothersome crows. It’s a puzzle game and a jumpless platformer, and it’s endlessly amazing and mind-boggling to behold.

It is also one of the easiest games I’ve ever played, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check it out.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Your game may be great, but languish in a cobwebbed corner of the iTunes store. That was almost the fate of Little Inferno, an original downloadable game launched in 2012 by indie outfit Tomorrow Corporation. They made some mistakes — big and small — that all devs hope to avoid.

One of the many cool things at the Game Developers Conference each year is the post-mortem talk, a look at what a game did well, or not so well, by the developers who made the game. This year, we were lucky to hear a talk about Little Inferno and the mistakes the team made along the way.

From lakes to oceans, people everywhere can be found fishing. With busy workdays and full weekends, it can be hard to find the time to go out and cast your reel. The new app Ace Fishing: Wild Catch brings the thrill of fishing to all iPhones and iPads for free. Explore the world and catch over hundreds of different types of fish right away. Do you think you can catch even the most rare fish?

Take a look at the video and find out what you think.

This is a Cult of Mac video review of the multi-platform application Ace Fishing: Wild Catch – Com2uS USA, Inc., brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.

Alright, so we’ve endlessly run, flown, swam, and jetpacked. Why not add skateboarding to that list?

Skyline Skaters is a new free-to-play endless skateboarder that transports you to a world with one of the most ridiculously strict police forces ever. I always thought it was weird in Jet Set Radio Future when the official response to graffiti was for a bunch of officers to run down perpetrators and hold them down so that their boss could come up and shoot them with his giant hand cannon.

These police are a little less hands-on, opting to chase down renegade skateboarders with a helicopter and catch them with a comically large claw. As for the game itself, it’s a fun time once you suspend that disbelief.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Games make up more than 65 percent of downloads in the App Store and Google Play, and a whopping 90 percent of mobile gaming revenue is generated by a freemium business model, according to Bertrand Schmitt, CEO of App Annie.

These are just two of the insights that came from a trends panel at the Game Developers Conference last month in San Francisco. The panel also included folks from gaming engine Unity and publisher/developer Pocket Gems.

Evolution, just released on the App Store, is looking like a badass free-to-play science fiction role-playing game with real style.

Build your base to collect resources, battle with your character in real time, solve environmental puzzles, and upgrade everything–weapons, armor, special abilities–as you go.

All of this and free to boot, Evolution promises to meet your sci-fi combat gaming needs on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

While the app store is updated every week, many new addicting games come with it. With so many developers creating their own versions of popular apps, only some succeed at adding their own original twists. The new app Tiny Frog is an arcade game that takes a familiar popular style of gameplay and adapts it into a new form. Help the frog reach as many lily pads as possible in 15 seconds. Do you think you can tap quick enough to get the highest score of all your friends?

Take a look at the video and find out what you think.

This is a Cult of Mac video review of the iOS application Tiny Frog – redBit games, brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.

What are you doing?

You would tell yourself, “I am reading a review for Sometimes You Die.” You take it for granted that I am going somewhere with this. My opinion is just a shadow. A number.

Alright, I can’t keep that up, but before you leap into the Internet and punch me in the face, know two things: First, that was a taste of the narration for the oddball minimalist platformer Sometimes You Die. And second, I’m still recovering from my last face punch, so don’t be a jerk.

As for the game, it’s brilliant. You don’t even need to read the rest of this. Just go buy it and get it in your brain-hole.

Note: This article previously appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine, available in the App Store.

Godus is the upcoming game from god-game specialist designer Peter Molyneux. The game will play on Mac and iOS seamlessly, letting you create and nurture your own little island paradise on one platform and then watch it develop on the other.

“We want to reinvent the genre of god-games,” Molyneux told Cult of Mac from his vantage point in a suite at the swanky Intercontinental Hotel.

Remember that slick-looking Diablo-style hack and slash game we raved about, KingsRoad? We were astonished that such a full-on console-level action RPG game was available on Facebook when we saw it demoed at the Game Developers Conference a couple of weeks back.

Well, now we can finally come clean and share the news: KingsRoad is coming to iPad. You’ll be able to play with all your Facebook buddies, too, as the game will use the very same servers across all platforms.

Loot and raid on my Mac, and then take it on the go? Yes, please.

The phrase “here comes the boom” returns in a whole new form in the new app Boom Beach. One of the iTunes app store’s newest comers, Boom Beach is a combat strategy game where players overtake islands, uncover hidden powers, and build their troops. With easy controls, great graphics and so much more will you join the war in this new game?

Take a look at the video and find out what you think.

This is a Cult of Mac video review of the iOS application Boom Beach – Supercell, brought to you by Joshua Smith of TechBytes W/ Jsmith.

Side-scrolling shoot-em-ups are typically exercises in excess. You have no shortage of enemies, power-ups, or ridiculously large bosses, and most importantly, you have all the bullets you’ll ever need. Just hit the button anytime, and bullets come out. That’s how it works.

“Oh, really?” says Exodite. “How about if it didn’t?” And that’s when things get a little weird.

By limiting your ammo, Exodite brazenly defies decades of tradition. And it’s kind of brilliant for that.

Note: This article was originally published in Cult of Mac Magazine, available on the App Store.

Flappy Bird came onto the scene with a bang, ruffling feathers from Hanoi to Hannover. Dong Nguyen, the developer of this seemingly overnight sensation, was as taken aback as the rest of us, evident from his shocking decision to stop offering the game for download as well as his recent decision to bring it back.

Game developers and publishers can only hope to reproduce this kind of crazy success. And each and every one of the people we talked to at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was eager to share opinions on how Flappy Bird happened, how it might happen again, and why it was such a runaway hit to begin with.

FTL: Faster Than Light came out in September of 2012, and we’ve done nothing but rave about it since then.

The only thing missing from the FTL experience, though, was the ability to play the dang thing on an iPad. “How sweet would that be?” we thought.

Today’s our lucky day, then, as the developers behind the hot space-sim rogue-like have righted the wrongs in their universe by letting us all know that FTL would be available for the iPad (along with an Advanced Edition for the Mac and PC) this coming April 3.

It was a close call this week in our games department, as reviewer extraordinaire Evan Killham lobbied hard for his favorite, Words & Cards. Granted, it’s a great game, but I had to push back a bit. Plus, I’m the editor, so I win.

Star Wars Assault Team is kind of the perfect blend of role-playing game stickiness with digital collectible card game features, all put together with your favorite Star Wars characters to boot.

The writing is great, with plenty of nods to the iconic movie series, and we finally get to see something new: how you spell Chewbacca’s roars. Really, that’s worth the download right there.

Here’s our Game of the Week video below to show you a bit of the game play.