gaming - page 23

The Apache helicopter in Apache Candy is more like a friend to Jay Jay the Jet Plane than a fierce combat copter. He’s the little pink and purple avenger that could, and all he wants is to collect candy.

Apache Candy is another infinite side-scrolling shooter on iOS, but the cheery graphics are what drew me to it. It reminds me of the retro game Twinbee and other cute-em-up shooters that have you blasting your way through screen after screen of adorable-yet-lethal enemies. Apache Candy is nowhere near as deep–you’re really only collecting candy and trying not to die–but the look was enough to satisfy.

Australian-based developer Halfbrick is at it again, with free-to-play Colossatron: Massive World Threat, now available around the globe.

You’ll take on the role of the humungous mechanical robot Colossatron on your quest to utterly destroy city after city, using various colored robotic modules to give your wanton destruction just a little extra oomph.

Yeah, color-matching doesn’t sound that fun, but this one? It really is.

The Colossatron is a mysterious, robotic dragon-thing that drops out of space specifically to destroy cities. Nobody knows what it is or where it came from; all we know is that it must be destroyed before it destroys us.

Nobody even knows how to control it, and that includes anyone playing the game.

Colossatron: Massive World Threat is the latest from Jetpack Joyride developer Halfbrick, and it’s the studio’s most esoteric title yet. And this is the team that also made a game about chopping fruit while avoiding bombs that, while possessing fuses, apparently only explode if they get cut.

So, yeah. It’s even weirder than that.

The new Walking Dead: The Game Trailer looks creepy as hell.

It’s been a year since Telltale’s first Walking Dead game came out and scared the crap out of all of us. Now Telltale has just released the first episode of the second season, titled appropriately enough The Walking Dead: Season Two.

Check out the trailer (rated M) below.

That headline isn’t hyperbole. I’ve started this review three times, but I kept thinking of things I should “check out” in the game so that I could make sure I was writing the thing properly. But mainly, I just wanted to keep playing the new Adventure Time version of Ski Safari.

If you haven’t played the original, it’s a twist on the endless runner genre: The endless skier. The hapless hero has to give it all he has to outrun an avalanche that is barreling down the hill behind him. He can do backflips for points and can hitch rides on the local wildlife for speed boosts, and all the while, he’s collecting as many coins as he can.

Ski Safari: Adventure Time is the same thing only with 100 percent fewer skis and way more characters from Pendleton Ward’s awesome cartoon series. So basically, it’s better in every way.

Nightmare: Malaria is the story of a little girl with malaria. In her dreams, she is thrust into a horrible nightmare world where she is trying to save her teddy bears from a horrible world infested with malaria-carrying mosquitoes and vats of bubbling disease. Your goal is to guide her through the world and hide in screened tents to ward off the infected bugs.

You can download the game for free, but between each level you’ll see a prompt for a microtransaction. This won’t unlock features in the game, and you don’t need to contribute money to win, but the $3 purchase is actually a donation toward providing mosquito nets to people at risk for contracting malaria. You can donate as often as you want, and the whole game is designed to educate players on the dangers of the disease. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Against Malaria Foundation work tirelessly to help eradicate malaria, but your small contribution can provide preventative measures to people who can’t help themselves.

Alright, so they’re the “AntiSquad” because they’re a ragtag bunch of misfits with little in common who still manage to pull together and get the job done when it counts. But sometimes headlines are hard.

AntiSquad is a new tactical game with a cartoonish art style and a whole lot of things to tap on. If you’ve played games like Breach & Clear or Final Fantasy Tactics, you get the general idea: Your group and the enemy take turns moving across a map trying to get into position to attack or outmaneuver each other. You have grids and buffs and cooldowns and all that other genre-standard stuff.

And other than its cool art, “genre-standard” is the best way I can think of to describe this game.

Square Enix announced Tuesday the release of the very first Tomb Raider, the initial game in a long-running franchise that has spawned sequels across console platforms, PC, the Mac, and even a couple of movies.

The release today to the iPhone and iPad is a direct port of the original game, complete with charming old school graphics and gameplay. And buttons. Lots of crappy virtual onscreen buttons.

Even though there are a ton of games out there that have refined this type of gameplay that you can get for a similar price, you’ll surely get to see where this popular genre got its start.

The inevitable fate of all popular mascots to eventually end up in a go kart. Take a look at Mario, Crash Bandicoot, Sonic, and many other iconic video game mascot characters and you’ll find they’ve all squished themselves into a car at some point. Well, now the Angry Birds are, too.

Angry Birds Go is a free-to-play karting adventure full of repetition and cool-down meters. Unlocking aesthetically pleasing carts means putting in real money, and your spirited birdy racers get tired after a short while. Beyond that, Go is a completely average racer.

I don’t know why characters in endless runner games are always in such a big hurry.

Sure, Runbot was fleeing the secret lab that created him. And the guy in Temple Run has that whole “killer demon monkeys” thing going on, so he’s cool.

But Rez, the hero of the new endless runner Galaxy Run, is just headed home. Why’s he gotta be Mr. Perpetual Motion all the time? It just gets him killed a lot.

Looking at the Facebook Games Of The Year list, it’s pretty clear what Facebook gamers enjoy. A majority of the 22 titles are casual, with hits like Candy Crush and Farmville 2. One comment heard around the Cult of Mac writer’s room was, “Who’s ever heard of these games?”

The one game that stands out is Disruptor Beam’s Game of Thrones Ascent, a fairly mid-core gaming title. We asked Jon Radoff, CEO and founder of Disruptor Beam, how it feels to rise to the top of Facebook’s casual-game environment.

“I think Facebook wanted to develop a list that contains some of the most popular games in the world (like Candy Crush) but they also made an effort to include innovative and more unique games,” Radoff told Cult of Mac by email. “Game of Thrones Ascent stands out among the games because we created something new: a story-driven strategy game, which nobody knew would work on Facebook until we tried.”

Yes, the beatings and bright lights of GTA: San Andreas have finally been squeezed onto iPad and iPhone screens. But that’s not the only good news this week regarding iOS ports of big-name classics.

Transport Tycoon, an elegant SimCity-like game that focuses on planning, constructing and managing a transportation empire, has just released a free version of its iOS port, which was originally released at the end of October.

The first thing you’ll notice about Star Trek: Trexels (if you’re a massive nerd like me anyway) is that all the little pixel people are wearing Original Series uniforms while the overall game interface is the LCARS system from The Next Generation. A minor complaint, but it is a gripe I feel keeps Trexels from reaching its true potential.

You play as a Starfleet admiral tasked with searching for the USS Valiant that disappeared in the currently unexplored Trexel system. The Valiant may have been destroyed but Starfleet doesn’t know for sure. So you hire a crew and send a barely constructed starship out to explore uncharted space. Nothing bad whatsoever could happen!

In my review of The Room a few months ago, I said it was the best mobile game I’ve ever played, and I meant it. The Room 2, the iPad-only sequel to the puzzle-box escape title, is out now, and it’s more of the same.

And I have absolutely no problem with that.

It’s really good. It’s really, really good. If you played the first one, you should play this one immediately. And if you didn’t play the first one, you should play it, and then you should play this one, and then you’ll be all set.

So, yes. You could say I am a fan.

If you’ve never given the classic Fallout games a try, now’s your chance. GoG.com is giving three of them away for free for 48 hours, as part of the classic games digital distributor’s Winter Sale for 2013.

You can get the Mac version of Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics for free until Friday, December 12, so get on it now.

The Room Two launched today on the iTunes App Store. As the sequel to Apple’s 2012 Game Of The Year (The Room), it has a lot to live up to.

Our reviewer called it a “must download” game, and we picked the original locked box puzzle game as an iOS Game of the Week.

The Room Two promises more of the same, and that’s not a bad thing. Developer Fireproof Games found the perfect mix of eye candy, just-tough-enough puzzle solving, and a haunting soundtrack in the first game, so any more of that is extremely welcome.

If you wreck a house during a party,someone has to clean it up. House Cleaning has a kind of warped, hoarder-ish perspective on tidying up that will have your kids shoving all their misplaced mess into boxes. But it might encourage children to try to clean up after themselves if all other forms of parenting fail.

After a totally awesome bash, the cutie cleaners in House Cleaning realize they can’t just leave books and CDs scattered throughout the garden of their friend’s home. So, you must dutifully help them sort out the garbage from the decent items before they can move onto another section of the post-party warzone. Plus, they’ll even do a bit of magical yard work when you’re done.

The Elder Scrolls Online, from Bethesda Software, is coming April 4, 2014, and not to the hot new consoles, oh no. The hotly-anticipated online sequel to one of the hottest role-playing games of the past few years is coming to Mac and PC before releasing to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 the following June.

Imagine that–a huge gaming title coming to your Mac before your console-loving friends can get their hands on it.

Assassin’s Creed IV launched on consoles this fall and offered all the ship-on-ship action gamers required. Developer Ubisoft, not one to let a good idea go un-reused, has now released Assassin’s Creed Pirates, a sidestory about one man’s rise from prisoner to fearsome buccaneer captain. It ditches the main series’ free-running in favor of a completely seaborne experience.

Does Pirates rake in the booty, or does it walk the plank to plunge the briny deep to Davy Jones’ Locker? Could that last sentence have been any more forced?

You’ll find the answers to these questions and more after the break.

I’ve played digital card games on my iPad before, including some heavy hitters like Might And Magic: Duel Of Champions and Magic 2014.

I’ve played some real-time battle arena games, like Raid Leader or Skulls of the Shogun, and enjoyed them as well.

But I’ve never, until now, played such an engaging mashup of the two gaming genres. What Singapore-based Spicy Horse has done here is create nothing less than a sublime, well-balanced, purely addictive combination of collectible card game, arena-based real-time strategy, and a training/leveling up system that just begs for exploration and mastery.

Whale Trail and Blip Blup developer Ustwo released a new trailer for its upcoming game Monument Valley, a stunningly beautiful game that looks to be influenced by the art of MC Escher, with gameplay that seems similar to hit indie game, Fez.

Aside from those obvious comparisons, what the trailer and accompanying screenshots show is a mind- and perspective-bending gameplay trip through various and brightly-colored worlds, guiding the silent princess protagonist through crazy architectural geometries.

Designer Ken Wong calls it “a beautiful, exploratory experience, somewhere between exploring a toy shop and reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.”

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I’m old, so I remember playing the original Double Dragon on a decrepit arcade cabinet at Showbiz Pizza while the Rock-afire Explosion played and lurched in its creeepy, mechanical way in the next room and I just paid attention to the game because I knew that if I thought about the musical robots coming to life and murdering everyone, they would. And that’s how I predicted The Secret.

Anyway, I was never good at Double Dragon. The enemies punched too fast or too hard, or I couldn’t line up my hits correctly, and I swear that stupid machine was broken because it was impossible. Now, we have Double Dragon Trilogy, an iOS port of the brawler series that includes remixed music and some new modes.

And I know this is a good port because I’m still really bad at it.

When I saw Tunnel Escape in the App Store my first thought was that it looked a lot like the magic carpet sequence in the Super Nintendo version of Disney’s Aladdin (which is the best version, do not bring your Genesis fanboyism into this). What I wasn’t prepared for was it bringing back all the tension I felt as a kid trying to avoid swells of lava while soaring through increasingly narrow passages.

Tunnel Escape is decidedly much more relaxed than Aladdin as the only thing you’re fighting against is how long you tap the screen. Each tap raises the little cube higher in the world, and if you don’t tap, it’ll sink down on the bottom of the tunnel. Touching the walls, or top of the screen, means instant death, so you have to feather your taps to succeed.

We all aspire to be more than we are, to mold ourselves into our own perfect forms and escape the limits thrust upon us by circumstance or luck. But we can’t always do it on our own. Sometimes, we need someone to come along and nudge us in the right direction and help us achieve our full potential.

Division Cell is a metaphor for that. I think. I mean, it could be, I guess. It’s a minimalist puzzle game about helping unhappy shapes to become what they wish to be. See that rectangle? It really just wants to be a square. That irregular polygon over there? It looks at triangles with tears in its eyes and whispers “Why not me?” into the night.

Why wouldn’t you help them out? Jerk.

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 an acrobatic hedgehog, Wide Sky from Marcus Eckert. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter Nadine thinks.