In case you’re not from around here, you should know that I’m a huge fan of Scottish game developer Lucky Frame, what with their weird, wonderful visual and musical sensibilities that result in games like Pugs Luv Beats and Gentlemen!, a Victorian-themed Joust-like game.
They’ve just announced that one of their most award-winning games, Bad Hotel, is coming to the Mac and I, for one, couldn’t be more excited.
In a world overrun with endless runners, it’s nice to see a cheery little beat-em-up among their number. Nakama is the delightfully colorful quest of a ninja rescuing his friends from bad guys then teaming up with them to take on even bigger, badder dudes ahead.
Nakama is yet another faux-retro style brawler, complete with pixel graphics. The use of color sets it apart from most, however. Splashes of brilliant greens and vibrant pinks set a whimsical tone as you slash through hordes of baddies. When you fall in battle, you can even ride a cloud back to your last location, Dragon Ball-style.
Hidden object games don’t usually catch my fancy, to be honest. I’ve never been a big fan of the mechanics, which typically require you to find objects to then reveal other objects, which can then be combined to become actual useful objects. I’ve also never been too taken by the typical romanticized story lines, either.
Big Fish’s new game, developed by India-based IronCode Games, Pahelika Secret Legends has found a way to convince me otherwise,t hough, and I find myself being drawn back to playing it often. There’s a fairly interesting story, and the puzzles are tough enough to provide a challenge without busting a brain.
If you’re like me and have been ambivalent about trying a game like this out, perhaps this is the one to start with.
Oh, woe are we!
Telltale’s follow up to hit adventure game The Walking Dead has been delayed for Mac, due to “an unforeseen issue with the Mac version of Episode 1,” whatever that means. The Wolf Among Us is an episode-based adaptation of Vetigo’s Fable, a graphic novel set in the real world with mythical fairy tale creatures like Snow White, Jack Frost, Pinocchio, and–of course–the Big Bad Wolf.
The game publisher updated its original blog post announcement of the October 11 release to say that it “is working on an update right now and expect to have the Mac build live on Steam and the Telltale website within the next few days.”
This week Cult of Mac Magazine gets serious about games with an issue dedicated to one of our favorite pastimes.
We’ve never bought into the idea that video games turn your brain to mush (sorry mom!) and this issue explores the games that are doing good — the growing market for empathy games that strive to make us all better people. (The retro-tastic cover is the handiwork of Craig Grannell, the designing force behind the magazine.)
We also look at games that are engaging enough to convince the non-gamers you know to take up the controller, what to play when you’re sick of the blockbusters and our Games Editor Rob LeFebvre tells you how to get your game on our radar for a review.
The latest issue is available in the App Store. Let the games begin!
When role-playing game heroes die, I suspect Puzzle Dungeon is what their hell looks like. Plodding music, 60 progressively tricky puzzles, and a bare-bones presentation, Puzzle Dungeon gives you a glimpse at the unpleasant side of the 16-bit afterlife.
If you’re familiar with games like Chew Man Fu, The Adventures of Lolo, and all those generic block-pushing programs on old cell phones, you’ll immediately know how to play Puzzle Dungeon.
The adventure-game genre has two salient qualities: puzzles and story. I’ve played titles with great puzzles and crappy stories, and I’ve played ones with amazing stories and awful, boring puzzles. I’ve even played some in which both the puzzles and plots were great, and some where they were both bad. There may be some kind of permutation formula at work here, but that’s not important.
Brightstone Mysteries: Paranormal Hotel‘s story and puzzles are neither great nor terrible; it is completely average across the board. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth playing if you need an adventure fix, but it probably shouldn’t be your first choice especially since something like seven Monkey Island games are currently available in the App Store.
Regardless, Paranormal Hotel serves its purpose and does what it needs to.
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.