gaming - page 28

Note: This article originally appeared in the Newsstand magazine” target=”_blank”>Cult of Mac Newsstand issue, Game On!. Grab yourself a copy or subscribe today.

Michael Frauenhofer is an indie developer who currently lives in Pennsylvania. He and his mom made Demon Chic, a story-based, decidedly indie game available for iPad. The game focuses on three roommates trying to live life while battling monsters, giant babies, and floating heads. It’s an experience that turns the traditional idea of monster battles on its head, as the main characters all are really fighting their own inner demons.

Demon Chic is a hallucinogenic trip through the lives of three ordinary people who must learn to live with their illness, not cure it, and find some sort of fulfilling life while doing so.

This ain’t no Angry Birds sequel, folks, so buckle up.

Waking up, looking at your clock, and seeing that you’re late for work or class is one of the worst feelings in the world. In that heart-stopping instant, you feel your control over your life drop into your stomach, and all you can think about is how annoyed or mad or disappointed the people waiting on you are going to be. It’s an adrenaline-drenched nightmare of a moment in which you realize just how quickly you can put your pants on and brush your teeth, and as you bolt out the door to face your fate, you wonder why you can’t always get ready that quickly.

Gary, the hero of developer Noego’s Level 22, is caught in that situation, and the really bad news is that he’s been late to work so many times that if anyone sees him this morning, he will lose his job. So on top of the already stressful situation of being late, he has to sneak his way up to the 22nd floor without anyone seeing him.

That’s right: This is a stealth game about going to work. And it’s every bit as silly and fun as that sounds.

If you’re in the mood for an old-fashioned computer role-playing game but don’t want to go through the dark rites of hardware emulation, Gurk III is a welcome alternative.

Originally released exclusively on Google Play, the Gurk games are bare-bones RPG adventures that pit a small group of adventurers with generated stats against kobolds, goblins, and all sorts of cave-lurking baddies–kind of like the old DOS Shareware title Castle of the Winds.

Warner Bros. / DC Comics-owned Vertigo has published this amazing ongoing series called Fables since 2002. Written by Bill Willingham, the stories all revolve around the idea that all the characters in fairy tales are real, and they’ve been banished to upstate New York until they can reclaim their ancestral homelands.

One of the most interesting characters is Bigby, better known as the big bad wolf from tales like “Red Riding Hood” and “The Three Little Pigs.”

Bigby is the sheriff of this winged-horse town, and he’s kind of a badass. Check out the trailer below for a glimpse of this gritty noir-thriller based on the award-winning comic, Fables.

I can really appreciate an app that values my time, so I’m going to just throw this in here at the start: SpellGrid, an anagram/crossword game out now for iPhone and iPad, will have you playing within five seconds of opening it. That doesn’t affect my review, but I’ve seen enough startup loading screens to think this is worth mentioning.

Alright, now about the game:

In SpellGrid, you start with a word which contains no repeating letters (e.g. smelting). Then, you have a set amount of time to see how many more words you can form, crossword-style, from those letters. The amount of time depends on the length of the starting word; it can be seven, eight, or nine letters long, and you’ll have one, two, or three minutes, respectively, to play your round.

Every once in a while, an alien threat arises that is so malevolent and so heinous that the only thing to do is send a one-man ship out into space to take them all on singlehandedly.

Alright, so that’s never happened in the history of ever, but in video games, it’s been going on at least since Space Invaders in 1978. And it is in this fine tradition of lonely, foolish heroism that we have Space Qube, a new shooter for the iPhone and iPad. If you’ve played any “One ship vs. all aliens” game before, you know what to expect here: The ship goes back and forth; the aliens fly in distinct patterns and shoot at you; you pick up powerups; and every once in a while, you fight a boss.

And if that’s all it did, I would say that Space Qube is very capable and leave it at that. But it has one extra feature that makes it stand out.

Copenhagen-based games studio Full Control announced Monday a new, free, three mission campaign for its strategy game, Space Hulk, available for Mac and PC since last August.

The turn-based Space Hulk, set in the Warhammer 40,000 sci-fi universe, is a re-creation of Games Workshop’s original two-player Space Hulk board game, itself released in 1989. The new digital version is similar in many ways to the board game, with two-player tactical claustrophobia as a main focus.

The launch of the digital game was a bit rough, however, with lots of bugs and room for improvement. So the team decided to improve the game, squash the bugs, and–as a big “thank you” for the patience of its fans–has released a new three-mission campaign for free.

Video games are all about solving problems and helping people. Sometimes, the problem is “too many monsters” and the people are the ones who made all those monsters in the first place.

So it is with Link the Slug, a puzzle game from developer OX Play, which is about a hapless scientist who accidentally creates a new species of colorful slugs and immediately decides that they must all die horribly. And that’s where you come in.

To destroy the slugs — who I will remind you have done nothing wrong — you must “link” them by tapping on two slugs of the same color. This will cause electricity to arc between the two targets, killing them both. Electricity can turn either left or right once so you want to link slugs around corners, but it can’t pass through obstacles or other slugs.

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 tons of Disney fun with Disney Infinity: Toy Box, which is free on the app store. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter thinks.

I really hate zombies. They’re gross and smelly and violent, and they get everywhere. So killing them is basically a victimless crime, right? For example: If I were to, say, take a truck and attach a giant mechanical arm to it, and then put a gun on the end of that arm, and then have my buddy drive me around a zombie-infested city so I could sit inside and just fire endless rounds into the undead legion and maybe laugh like a crazy person while doing it, which court in the world would convict me?

No court, is which one.

That’s kinda the premise of Gunner Z, minus the lengthy, sensational trial: You’re the gunner of a suped-up armored truck that drives around shooting zombies and occasionally members of a fringe paramilitary group. It’s an arcade-style, free-to-play shootfest in which you mow down endless waves of zombies in a world gone mad.

And it’s surprisingly dull.

Brianna and Frank Wu didn’t set out to make a statement.

They just ended up creating a full-on spy-meets-spice-girls mobile game with the most distinctive look you’ve ever seen, and all the roles that matter are filled with women.

“I love the idea of powerful girls who are blowing stuff up,” says Frank Wu, “flying spaceships, diffusing bombs, and doing all the stuff that you associate with space marines, but it’s kind of irrelevant to the story that they’re girls.”

Irrelevant to the storyline, maybe, but in an entertainment media that is short on strong, normative female lead characters, upcoming iPad game Revolution 60 is a breath of fresh air.

Everyone loves feeding cute little animals, and mobile-game developers are no different. Games like Cut the Rope and Cat on a Diet are all about bringing food to adorable, tiny faces, and Drop That Candy continues the tradition.

In this colorful puzzle game, you are tasked with clearing all of the candy in a series of boxes in order to drop them into the waiting mouth of Gizmo, a woodland creature of indeterminate species. You do this by tapping on the candy, and you can clear multiple pieces of the same color with a single tap if they are touching.

It’s an odd setup, but it all adds up to a game that is equally cute, clever, and fun.

Oh, that Baldur, always leaving his Gate open for demons to walk through and attack the world. Silly Baldur.

Developer Beamdog, along with Atari and Overhaul Games, announced pre-purchasing for the upcoming Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, coming to Mac and PC November 15, 2013, and iOS and Android “soon.” The sequel to last year’s successful Baldur’s Gate will run you $24.95 for the full HD resolution and remastered art from the original game, which released in September of 2000, quickly becoming “the most celebrated Dungeon’s & Dragons … game of its time,” currently sitting at a Metacritic score of 95.

There’s a new gameplay trailer, as well, which you can see below.

You know what people love? Cats. Just look at the Internet: It has cats everywhere.

You know what else people love? Breaking stuff. Just look at Angry Birds.

And a third thing people love? Taking two things and jamming them together. So now we have Cat on a Diet, a game about breaking stuff. Plus, it has a cat. And the cat is overweight. So that’s like a hat trick. Best game ever.

Well … it’s alright.

The Bitizens are back, and this time, it’s all about trains! Who doesn’t like trains?

Fresh off their hit Snake re-imagining Nimble Quest, NimbleBit has turned in a lovely little game that looks and plays a lot like last year’s hit Pocket Planes, with retro pixel art style and transit-themed, schedule-based gameplay. There’s a lot to like in this new iteration, as well, including streamlined mechanics, refined strategies, and updated graphics.

Let’s take a look.

The endless runner genre might be in a bit of a rut. You run, run some more, kick that thing, avoid that other thing, jump over that third thing … it’s all getting a little predictable.

Luckily, we have games like Boson X to mix things up a bit. Its developer bills it as a “rotational runner,” and it takes an interesting approach to adding to the genre: subtraction. Boson X doesn’t add new features like lasers or parkour like, for example, Runbot; it’s actually very minimal. And therein lies its strength.

Have you ever realized just how much random chance is involved in your favorite video games?

Consider dashing through Diablo III dungeons, mashing buttons and watching your little avatar cut through swathes of demon enemies. Each of those hits is managed by a vast mathematical model in the background, deciding how many hit points each swing of your sword or blast of your magic will take off of each monster in your path.

Tower of Fortune 2, like it’s predecessor, seems like an indie meditation on the RPG genre itself by exposing the mechanics in the background of typical RPGs with the biggest symbol of luck ever: the slot machine.

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 highlights, game stats, player news, and all sorts of Football fun with NFL Mobile, from NFL Enterprises. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporters think.

Strata, a puzzle game by developer Graveck, has been out for a few months now, but I only recently stumbled across it. Like FlowDoku, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, it’s a deceptively clever title that uses a couple quick rules to create complex tasks for players to solve.

The rules of Strata are simple: You receive a square grid between 2×2 and 6×6 boxes in size, and you have to place colored ribbons across every row and column. Some boxes have colored squares in them, and the top ribbon on that square must be the same color. That sounds way more complicated than it is, but it makes sense once you’re looking at it.

And you should look at it because it’s really, really pretty.

Seminal 1990s tabletop role-playing game, Shadowrun, has recently come to the digital domain, originally with a version of Shadowrun Returns for the Mac, PC, and Linux platforms. Cult of Mac gave the game a stellar review, calling it a “fully realized tabletop to digital RPG conversion.” Say that five times fast.

Now the game is finally on tablets, both of the Android and iOS variety, and the buzz is that it’s a note-for-note port of the desktop game, minus the campaign editor. That’s a lot of game to smoosh into a tablet.

You know how it goes: You’re the king, you have prestige and power and piles of riches all around you … and then some goblin shows up and steals your pants.

Alright, maybe none of that has ever happened to me, ever, but it is the premise of Trouserheart, a new hack-and-slash action game out today by developer 10tons (makers of the Joining Hands puzzle series).

Given the “epic quest to rescue kidnapped pants” premise, you’d expect Trouserheart to be a pretty light affair. And it is, but it’s also a solid, satisfying experience.

With an odd mix of Bejeweled and Pokemon, including a dash of inspiration from Puzzles and Dragons, Dragon Academy aims to be your next iOS game addiction. available now in the App Store for the low price of free-to-play, Dragon Academy tasks you with matching jewels of different dragon-enhancing powers to level up your adorable, charming dragons for even more jewel-matching fun.

We got the chance to sit down with Trent Polack, creative director at developer Team Chaos, and chat a bit about dragons, “hatch-three” puzzle games, and why the team decided to go with such a saturated genre to begin with.

I have a confession to make: I was probably the only human being on the planet not playing the original Angry Birds when it came out all the way back in 2009. As much as I love both birds and giant slingshots, I never really saw the appeal. I played for about five minutes, shot some birds into some things, and then shrugged and gave up.

Apparently, the game’s developer, Rovio Entertainment, saw this happen and did not approve, so it spent the next few years trying to come up with a way to get holdouts like me to buy in to its anti-pig propaganda machine. And so we received Angry Birds Star Wars, a dangerous cocktail of addictive, deceptively simple, physics-driven gameplay and just straight-up, unabashed nerditude. It was in many ways the perfect mobile game: accessible to everyone and irresistible to giant geeks like myself. But still, I resisted.

Now Angry Birds Star Wars II is out, however, I’m totally in.

You’ve got to admire a game that matches its own intent so perfectly that you suddenly can’t visualize how else the genre should be done. That’s certainly the case here with Zynga’s Solstice Arena. It’s currently my favorite MOBA game on any platform, which is great, since it plays well on both iOS and the Mac. I’m reviewing the Mac version here, but assume that–aside from touch controls–the game plays exactly the same on iOS. This is a good thing.

As a genre, the action real-time strategy (ARTS), or multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), has a history reaching back to modified RTS game maps for Starcraft and Warcraft. Recently, League of Legends from Riot Games has taken on the mantle as the most well-known game of its type, moving into the lucrative world of eSports, as well.

Zynga may be more known for Farmville and other Facebook games, but the San Francisco games publisher has delivered a much more midcore game than I expected. Developer A Bit Lucky has created a streamlined, compelling take on the ARTS genre, and while the game may not surpass more traditional entries in the field, Solstice Arena still engages players of all levels without sacrificing too much of the strategic depth of the game type.

The idea of being a martial-arts master has always sounded cool to me. But not the Zen-like, pensive, thoughtful type. If I’m honest, I’d really just kinda like to be the guy in the movies who can walk into a room full of generic dudes and beat them all up while they attack him one at a time. And I’m not particularly proud of that, but I challenge you to picture yourself doing it and not once think, “Yeah, that would be pretty neat.”

But one thing is standing between me and that dream. Alright, maybe a few more than one, but one major thing: I am completely uncoordinated. I don’t have the balance or grace to execute any of the amazing fighting maneuvers I see in movies, and so I watch them with a sad sort of wistfulness and self-disappointment. And this feeling extends to video games, in which physics and animations unbound by natural law allow for inhuman feats of martial prowess about which my clumsy limbs can only dream. If limbs dream, I guess.

Anyway, Dragon Finga, the recently released fighter by developer Another Place, did not inspire those feelings of inadequacy in me because it contains the least graceful fighting system I’ve ever seen.

And that’s a good thing.