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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.
The developer of 10000000–pronounced “ten million”–is working on a sequel, and to celebrate that fact, he’s dropped the price on the Mac and iOS versions of the first game (still pronounced the same way).
For $1.50 on Mac or $0.99 on iOS, you can get one of the coolest mashups I’ve played in recent memory. 10000000 is a delightful and engaging mix of endless runner, match-three, and RPG, and it’s super fun to play.
The new game, called You Must Build A Boat, has a pretty interesting story behind it, as well.
Love is difficult sometimes.
You’ve seen it: the unrequited, the ill-matched, the people who just never should have met in the first place. People who are so much opposite that you wonder why they don’t just murder each other. Alright, that last one is a bit extreme. Actually, it isn’t. I know some people.
Anyway, Pyro Jump is about a flame who is in love with a paper doll, and he will overcome any obstacle, jump any gap, and avoid any spike that stands between him and his cherished one.
She’s not too into it for obvious reasons, but the game’s fun. When I don’t hate it.
Daniel Hjelm has a pretty nifty game on his hands here: Loot Hero.
It’s the essence of RPG games, distilled down for the mobile platform. You tap on the left and right sides of the screen, and mow down enemy bad guys with your upgradeable weapon.
Here’s a quick video of my impressions and play through.
It’s been, like, a whole day since I’ve reviewed an endless game, so it’s a good thing they come out so regularly. I don’t even know how to handle games that don’t constantly scroll anymore.
Marvel Run Jump Smash! features cartoon-styled versions of Marvel Cinematic Universe characters (and some other superpowered guests) who are perpetually sprint after Loki, the adopted brother of Thor and villain from The Avengers, to reclaim the Cosmic Cube, which is what I will always call it because “The Tesseract” makes me cringe, and all of this just makes me sound like a giant nerd, but the point is that it’s an endless runner with superheroes.
It’s not a great one, but hey. Marvel.
Episodic noir-thriller adventure game, The Wolf Among Us, gets its second episode next week with “Smoke & Mirrors.”
Bigby Wolf is hell-bent on solving the murders revealed in Episode One, and will stop at nothing to get at the truth.
Dungeon Keeper on iOS is a free-to-play re-imagining of the classic Bullfrog Productions/Peter Molyneux PC game from the late ’90s. I really loved old school Dungeon Keeper as a kid, and it is one of the few tower defense/strategy titles I’ve ever enjoyed. So, no pressure on this iOS version, right?
Unfortunately, the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper suffers from very predictable free-to-play problems. Expanding your dungeon was never totally carefree in previous version of the game, but as your imps work to clear out 3×3 or 4×4 spaces for new rooms, they’ll quickly plow through soft rock which takes a matter of seconds but suddenly run up against walls that can take an entire day to knock down! So the breakdown is a few seconds, four hours, or 24 hours. That’s not well balanced at start.
I love developer Halfbrick’s endless runner Jetpack Joyride as much as anyone, but it always felt like it was missing something. And I never realized what it was until very recently. And then it hit me: baleen.
Baleen didn’t actually hit me; that would be gross. It’s all stringy.
Moby’s Revenge is a new endless title about a cute whale who escapes from an aquarium and has to avoid harpoons, mines, nets, and boats on his frantic and infinite swim toward freedom and wholesale slaughter of evil, Seaworld-running humans.
It sounds dark, but it isn’t.
Darwin’s Theory is a simplistic match-three puzzle game charging you with the task of evolving insects into lizards (yes). You start off with a grid of caterpillars and snails. Each turn you can put different animals down on the grid, with the hope of matching three of them up. Of course that would be just too easy on its own.
You’ll also have to contend with the only moving characters on the board, or the bacteria. Once you trap them in a square, they’ll turn into berries. And somehow, those berries turn into oysters. Seriously, I don’t know. Darwin’s made of magic.
If you’ve ever played an older role-playing game, you know the feeling of reaching a point at which you realize that your characters are too weak to progress, which means that you have to take them back to previous areas and kill boars or something to earn the experience to level up and become strong enough to actually continue playing the game.
Loot Hero is a game that is all about that moment. It’s an action-RPG, kinda, that has you running back and forth like a crazy person, killing monsters to gain experience so that you can continue running back and forth like a slightly stronger crazy person. And once you hit a wall, you have to go back to older levels with easier enemies so you can run back and forth there to gain experience and money to make your character better equipped to run back and forth among stronger enemies.
It sounds like a drag, and it kind of is, but it’s also surprisingly engaging.
Obsorb is hard.
It’s not that it’s complicated or the enemies move too quickly or even that its controls are tricky. But it’s one of those games where you’ve lost as soon as it starts, and all you can do is delay the inevitable.
In theory, if you were good enough at it, you could play it indefinitely. But that’s not going to happen because it’s impossible.
I’m a sucker for two kinds of mobile games: ones featuring improbably cute characters (preferably animals because they are more cuddly) and those that promise to scare the crap out of me.
In Fear I Trust, a new horror title by developer Black Wing Foundation, falls under the second category, but this first bit is just the first two chapters of a longer story, so we can’t really write off cuddly animals completely yet. But it’s the story of a person who has survived insane and amoral experiments at the hands of crazy Russian scientists, so I’m not going to hold my breath.
So far, it’s a dark and gloomy experience with more puzzles than frights, but it still has a lot going for it.
There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.
We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.
Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of apps on the App Store that they’re using.
This week, it’s a game about bringing rainbows of happiness to sad, grey creatures, TCHOW Rainbow from TCHOW. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter “Battle” thinks.
Infinite runners are called infinite because they continue indefinitely. This is a fact, and one completely lost to the developers of Joe Danger Infinity. In this side-scrolling “racing” game, you tap the screen as Joe charges along any of the 100 toy stunt tracks provided.
You can unlock new bikes (or rockets) through the coins you collect in each stage or through micro-transactions, and generally you’re competing against other players to get the highest score.
That’s if you can figure out how to score more than a few hundred points at any time.
Recently, I was playing my favorite match-three game, and a thought occurred to me.
“This is all well and good,” I said to myself. “But it could really use a lot more punching.”
And then, because I am apparently some kind of wizard, I found Zez, an oddly-named puzzle title that has you clearing groups of three (or four) robots in order to propel a cat with a boxing glove farther into the sky so that he can inflict the maximum amount of damage to his opponent in the ring below when he comes crashing back down to Earth.
I had a fever dream once with a similar premise, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun.
Hot Rod Hustle wants to bring bitcoin wagering to the Mac and PC, with real money betting available on iOS and Android. This is the first time we’ve heard of a racing game with available real-world money rewards on any platform.
All versions of Hot Rod Hustle will use the same servers, letting those on iOS play with those on Mac, for example. The Mac and PC version of Hot Rod Hustle will allow for Bitcoin wagering, while the mobile versions will use Skillz.com, an online wagering system, which is limited to 37 states as well as the UK and Scandanavia. The cross-platform compatibility means that you can build up your hot rod on your iPhone, then log in on your Mac and race for Bitcoins. Exciting!
We have no shortage of cute games about adorable characters who need your help to get home or something comparable, but here’s something a little different.
Kid Aviator is about a young carnival daredevil fired from a cannon who is trying to fly as high as he can to spite gravity. He has a cape. He has goggles. He is awesome.
The only problem is that the sky is full of all kinds of random crap that wants to ruin his affront to physics and Nature, and that’s where you come in.
Update: A SteelSeries representative sent us the following in an email asking why the price had been reduced so soon after the initial release.
“The response of this product coming out of CES was incredibly positive, [but] the largest concern was with the price set at $99.99 MSRP. Our goal with the Stratus goes beyond just selling a controller; it’s really about helping to define a new platform. We want to see that succeed and took initiative immediately after CES to find ways where we could improve the odds of that success by lower[ing] the price. The outcome is that our team was able to work with our partners to bring the cost for the consumer down to $79.99.”
Original Post: Well, it looks like the price wars have begun in earnest. SteelSeries’ Stratus is now $79.99, instead of the $99.99 it launched for at CES. If you pre-ordered this at the older price, you’re in luck: SteelSeries will honor the new, lower cost for all pre-orders.
Science is cool, and Atomic Fusion: Particle Collider wants you to know that.
It’s a tough game to describe. It’s kind of like a shooter, but you don’t shoot anything. It reminds me a bit of Tilt to Live except that nothing is really trying to kill you. You’re basically just flying around collecting stuff. So maybe it’s also a little like Katamari Damacy but not nearly so goofy.
Whatever it is, though, it’s fun.
Touchscreens and platformers just don’t mix most of the time. Lots of developers try to make platformers for mobile devices, of course, and will continue to as long as our collective nostalgia for Mega Man and Super Mario Bros. remains. UsagiMan is a creative spin on Mega Man-like platforming that compensates for less-responsive touch controls by sprinkling in a little web-slinging.
UsagiMan is a rabbit-shaped hero bounding through levels overflowing with high ledges and murderbots. Rather than ducking down to avoid enemy fire and carefully maneuvering over precarious platforms, UsagiMan flings himself across the screen via a Spider-Man-like grappling hook. Players can also attack enemies by furiously tapping them, which sends the hook out in rapid bursts.
Nobody likes to see a cute baby animal in danger. Sarah McLachlan has worked very hard to ensure that.
Lost Yeti is a cute game about an adorable baby yeti having a cuddly adventure. I never even knew an adventure could be cuddly, but this game taught me that it is not only possible, but preferable.
It’s also a smart, deceptively complicated puzzler that will keep you thinking, tapping, and swearing at those good-for-nothing monsters who pick on that poor little lost yeti for no reason other than that they are jerkfaces.
Spending by Mac and PC gamers will grow to more than $27 billion worldwide in the next three years, according to a new report from market research firm International Data Corporation.
Published Tuesday, the study also predicts that global PC and Mac digital game revenue will rise about 4 percent per year between 2012 and 2017, while North American revenue will slip due to the prevalence of more casual, browser-based games, as well as those on smartphones and tablets. IDC’s Worldwide Digital PC and Mac Gaming 2013–2017 Forecast also predicts a steady drop in subscription revenue from games like World of Warcraft.
Outside of North America, however, things look a bit rosier. IDC says that the digital PC and Mac digital gaming revenue should expand by more than five percent per year in countries with a currently rising standard of living, like Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC).
Barrels have been a staple of video games at least since Donkey Kong used them in his vain attempts to ward off a small, mustachioed man with a penchant for jumping.
What’s the deal with barrels? Is it that they’re easy to draw? Or fun to destroy? Or is it that their size and purpose provide a wealth of possibilities, their wooden or metal frames metaphors for the endless potential that lies within all of us, just waiting for someone to pry off the lid and share our special gifts with the world? Or something else less ridiculous?
Whatever the reason, barrels are awesome, and Tap & Blast, a fun aerial platformer of sorts out now for iOS devices, flipping loves them.