gaming - page 20

I think Mad Skills Motocross 2 saved my life.

It’s not because it taught me a valuable lesson about not mixing chemicals or that someone shot me, and I had Mad Skills Motocross 2 in my pocket, and it stopped the bullet. And it didn’t swim out and rescue me when I went beyond my depth in the grown-up pool.

No, Mad Skills Motocross 2 saved my life by teaching me that I should never, ever, attempt to ride a motocross bike. Because I will die.

I’m not very good at this game, is what I’m saying. But it’s still pretty good.

The folks behind the brilliant and sticky Tiny Death Star and Pocket Trains are back at it again, this time with another free-to-play title, Disco Zoo. This time, however, NimbleBit has the added talent of rock-star developer Owen Goss, a Canadian dude with a pedigree in gaming that reaches back to pre-iOS days (gasp).

Disco Zoo has the same Nimblebit retro bitizen look and feel, and the fun mechanics from Pocket Trains and Tiny Tower are out in force. You’ll take over running of the titular Zoo, adding animals and building habitats while earning in-game soft currency on a timed basis, as well as randomly on the zoo map screen.

The main part of the game involves rescuing animals from a variety of habitats–each requires the purchase of more and more expensive aircraft–and adding them to your zoo. The zoo animals will sleep after a time, which encourages you to keep checking back into the app to wake them up.

Primal Flame is one of those games that’s immediately impressive. Its brief loading screen at startup is gorgeous, and the title screen presents the obligatory social-networking links in its own cave-drawing aesthetic so that they fit in while still remaining recognizable.

But I’m not here just to talk about the title screen, luckily for you, and once you stop gawking at it and actually start Primal Flame up, it just keeps on being amazing.

You start with a black screen covered in specks with the sounds of a forest at night. Brighter lights start drifting down from the top, and you run your finger along the screen. Sparks fly and grow and burst into flame, and then you’re playing one of the most unique games I’ve ever seen.

Developer Pangea Software’s well-regarded Enigmo series of puzzle games has been around for a while, and they’ve turned over development of the latest installment, Enigmo: Explore to a new team, but the idea is the same: See that liquid dripping from a pipe over here? Get it into that jar over there.

The game gives you a suite of tools to accomplish this, including trampoline-like items that the drops bounce off of and little cannons that can send them even farther. It’s up to you to decide which items in which combinations to use to complete levels, which offers you a decent amount of freedom when you’re playing it.

But a couple other features work just as hard against you, and it’s kind of a shame.

Retro arcade gaming meets today’s latest hits in the application Hoppy Frog. Enjoy reminiscing the days of Frogger with the memories of Flappy Bird, as you progress your way up the high score charts. Will Hoppy Frog become your latest gaming addiction?

Take a look at Hoppy Frog and find out what you think.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the application “Hoppy Frog” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

I’m all about helping cute animals get home or get candy or whatever. Believe me, I am. But I’m also kind of a hypocrite because the most important word in that first sentence is “cute.” Give me a yeti or a little alien or whatever the hell Om Nom is in Cut the Rope, and I’ll give them whatever they want.

Show me something like the title characters in The Rainbowers, however … I mean, I’ll still do it. But I’ll look around first to see if any fuzzy bunnies need help gathering carrots or something.

But the game is fun, despite my terrible, terrible prejudice.

When I was a kid at Showbiz Pizza (back in those carefree days before that upstart rat staged his coup), the Dragon’s Lair cabinet always fascinated me. People would step up, watch a cartoon for about three seconds, and then they’d put another quarter in. They’d watch the same cartoon, and then they’d put another quarter in. And so it went until they said some words that my parents didn’t want me using and went off to play Dig Dug.

I didn’t understand what Dragon’s Lair was until much later; all I knew was that it looked like a movie and annoyed people.

This week, the iOS port of its 1991 sequel, Time Warp, made its way to the App Store, and it’s pretty much here to ruin your day and make you hate your fingers and your slow, stupid brain.

So basically, the old-school experience is intact, and I love it.

Tengami has gathered a bit of a following during its development due to its beautiful, pop-up-book art style and zen-like demeanor. It has relaxing music, a dialogue-free narrative, and puzzles that are clever and occasionally very tricky.

The game is out now as a universal app for iOS devices, and it has a lot of expectations to live up to. Can it live up to the excitement?

It absolutely does, delivering an endlessly fascinating experience in one of the most beautiful packages you have ever seen.

What’s that, you say? You’ve been longing for a retro, old school, three dimensional dungeon crawler to take with you on your iPhone and iPad?

Look no further than Coldfire Keep, a brand new first person dungeon crawler from Steve Jarman and Crescent Moon Games. You’ll have to make your way through this beautifully rendered 3D dungeon, full of monsters, puzzles, hidden secrets and–natch–tons of loot.

It should be in the App Store tonight (February 19) by 11 pm Eastern time here in the US, if all goes according to plan, and it’s looking pretty sweet, if the video below is to be trusted.

What do monsters, Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series of chaotic fighting games, and steampunk have in common?

Nothing, you guys. Absolutely nothing.

But those are all elements in Fright Fight, a new free-to-play, online-multiplayer brawler that has players controlling a variety of spooky monsters in fights to the death atop floating platforms. It’s chaotic, insane, and mostly fun.

It’s a Frankenstein’s Creature of disparate parts cobbled together, and the arcane force that brings it to lurching life is in-app purchases.

Fans of Cartoon Network’s megahit Adventure Time are probably familiar with “Card Wars,” an episode in which heroes Finn and Jake square off in a ludicrously complicated collectible card game.

If your first thought after seeing that installment was “I have to play that crazy-ass game,” you’re in luck: It’s now available for your iPhone or iPad. While not quite as complicated as the on-screen version, Card Wars offers the same basic card-and-board gameplay with 3D monsters battling it out for fortune and glory.

And behind its zany exterior lies a deceptively deep experience with Floops galore.

One of our favorite games, FTL, is getting a massive update, plus an iPad version. That’s pretty darn exciting.

The update includes new advanced weaponry, new systems and subsystems, new drones and equipment, new music, and new story content. Best of all, it’s going to be a free update. In a tweet earlier today, the FTL team updated fans on what’s new, including new features like the clone bay, mind control, and hacking systems. The iPad version will include all of these things, too, in a game that will now be called FTL: Advanced Edition.

Wondering what we've been up to? Check out our new post detailing some of the features of FTL: AE – https://t.co/9HAsO2ELcA

— FTL (@FTLgame) February 17, 2014

Check out the video below for some sweet visuals and auditory goodness.

The original Eliss wowed everyone back in 2009 with its multitouch controls, cool music, and increasingly frantic gameplay. Now, we have Eliss Infinity, which includes the original game and a few more modes to keep even veteran players interested.

Eliss is a puzzle/action/insanity game in which you have to manipulate the sizes of “planets” to make them fit inside of rings. You do this by combining smaller ones by dragging them into each other or splitting larger ones by pulling them apart with your thumbs. But differently colored planets can’t touch, or they’ll eat each other away.

That’s the basic idea. But Infinity has a lot more to offer.

Alright, so the Iron Man-shaped hero in Robo Nativity is totally not licensed. I was unsure if he was supposed to be more like Mega Man until a helpful prompt informed me that for a minimal fee I could also play as War Machine. So, you’re definitely playing as Iron Man in this curiously named platformer-meets-endless runner.

You start off running along the ground beneath various platforms. Enemies and obstacles require you to jump and fire as you collect as many gold coins as you can. As far as this being a nativity, you won’t encounter any babes in mangers, but the Mandarin-like baddies this not-Iron Man shoots do look a bit like wise men. So, don’t look for any new religions in Robo Nativity, unless you are way into the idea that Tony Stark is the messiah (I kinda am).

We have no shortage of endless running/flying/floating/swimming games in the App Store. And here’s another one.

Avoid: Sensory Overload is a techno-skinned endless game in which you guide a ship through a perpetual series of obstacles and traps. All the while, the thumping music and neon-infused background light show do their very best to distract you.

It’s flashy, annoying, challenging, and ultimately a lot of fun.

Jelly King ambitiously introduces himself as the king of all jellies…but that’s not quite true. Before he can take his rightful place as gelatinous royalty, he has to bounce his way through a harrowing adventure to collect diamond shards. No problem, right?

Jelly King is the kind of platformer that works well on mobile devices. In his excitement, the jelly you control is constantly bouncing. All you have to do is guide him left or right as you clear obstacles or pick up powerups. Jelly King bounces a certain distance each time you move, so the challenge is to anticipate future moves based off of where you start. If you’re too far away from the edge when Jelly jumps over a gap he might clear the first obstacle, but swiftly fall off the next.

While the smash-hit app Flappy Bird has been removed from the App Store, developer Dong Nguyen has still found success with a few of his other games. Consistently ranking at the top of the app charts how will Nguyen’s new game Shuriken Block rank in your interests?

Take a look at Shuriken Block and see how it compares to the hype and popularity of the late Flappy Bird.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application “Shuriken Block” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

Heroes went and got themselves in a big damn hurry.

It’s not enough anymore that they just get through the dungeon and fight the terrifying monster at the end. These days, they feel some strange need to do it all without stopping. It’s escalation, I guess; the new guys want to show off, so they run. Endlessly.

Dungeon Highway is the story of one such valiant champion who runs and shoots and dies a lot. And then you start over, and he runs and shoots and dies some more.

See that? That’s the excellent looking retro action platform from Levels or Lives, Super Fun Games, and Crescent Moon Games. It’s called Crystal Catacombs, and was successfully funded on Kickstarter in July of 2012.

To continue the process, the developers want to get Crystal Catacombs on Steam, which is perhaps the most well-known gaming distribution platform for Mac, Windows, and Linux games. The process there is known as Project Greenlight, and Steam members all vote on the games they’d like to see on Steam.

The elusive developer behind the smash-hit app Flappy Bird has other games in the App Store that haven’t yet been pulled. Are they any good?

Take a look at Super Ball Juggling and see if it measures up to the hype and fame of Flappy Bird.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application “Super Ball Juggling” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

This just in: Someone has made a game about zombies.

You probably weren’t expecting that, huh? A zombie game? It’s crazy on the face of it.

Now, look: I hate zombies as much as the next person. Maybe a bit more, even. Stupid shambling a****les. But that doesn’t mean I want to spend all of my gaming time killing them. I have a lot of other things to pretend to kill, like Nazis and Pokémon. So I’ll admit that I wasn’t immediately sold on Overlive, a new undead-themed gamebook with role-playing-game elements, even though it’s hard to go wrong with me once you start offering choices and stats.

Once I started playing it, though, Overlive won me over.

Here’s the thing about touch controls: You’re controlling the game with the same thing you’re using to see what you’re doing. This creates a problem when your dumb, clumsy fingers start blocking your view and lead to cheap and preventable deaths.

Some games prevent this by putting the control areas off to the side or in an otherwise unused place on the screen, leaving the view clear. Lego Star Wars: Microfighters, the latest in the synergetic juggernaut of a series, is not one of those titles.

It’s surprising that developers and publishers as experienced as Warner Bros. and Traveller’s Tales would allow such a clumsy and stupid thing to happen, but here it is.

If you’re into gaming, then having a versatile experience at your disposal is ideal. This Cult of Mac Deals offer gives you just that — and at a price that is tough to beat.

That’s right. The Mac/PC/XBOX 360/PS3 Gamer Hardware Bundle gives you a universal controller and headset that lets you game with top-notch quality and on multiple platforms. And you’ll get this bundle at a 20% savings — just $48!

I’m a big fan of words. The idea that you can arrange letters and spaces in such a way as to change minds, inspire emotion, and create art is powerful and almost magical.

And the idea that you can do the same thing to ruin someone’s day or knock them down a peg is a different kind of magic, but just as eagerly sought. Spell Quest: Grimm’s Journey falls into the latter, “words can hurt” camp.

But they’re hurting monsters, so it’s probably alright.

The History Channel has gotten a little weird over the past few years.

It used to be all about World War II and the Industrial Revolution, but ever since around 2008 or so, something has been creeping in. Something decidedly un-historic. Now, we flip over to History to learn about UFOs, prophecies, and pseudoscience. So it makes sense that the channel would release a fake documentary about a War of the Worlds-style conflict that took place instead of World War I.

The Great Martian War is an endless runner that shares its name with that program, and it places you in the middle of the conflict as a scout trying to deliver intel to Paris on foot. You’ll run, jump, and slide to avoid obstacles and massive alien walkers.

And you’ll die. You’ll die a lot.