gaming - page 32

When Peter Saghegyi lost his position at gaming developer Rockstar Vienna, the Hungarian native decided it was time for a change. He headed to London, and then ended up in Dubai, one of the more influential United Arab Emirates. He spent the boom years (2006-2008) trying to sell real estate visualizations to companies in the city, and later joined a branding agency to build an interactive content team from friends he had worked with at Rockstar. Unfortunately, that’s when the bust happened, and opportunities in Dubai became scarce.

As they had nothing to lose, the group decided to create a game about the city they now lived in.

I don’t want to wax too rhapsodic about a gangster game, but Omerta: City of Gangsters has what it takes to keep me engaged for an afternoon of beer and liquor smuggling, along with mafia-style combat justice along the way. The music is delightfully consistent with the period, and the hand-painted interstitial artwork is simply gorgeous.

An omertá is a code of silence, typically associated with the Mafia, that focuses on non-cooperation with the police and non-interference with the activities of others, especially when illegal. Luckily, we don’t have to be too quiet about this enjoyable romp through 1920s America, developed by Haemimont Games and published by Kalypso Studios, the folks behind similar games like Tropico 4.

Created in 1981, the Ultima series of computer games has a long and storied history. Richard Garriott (Lord British in-game) created Ultima while working at a ComputerLand, selling copies out of Ziploc bags and eventually getting picked up by a publishing company, creating his own publishing concern (Origin Systems), and finally selling Origin to Electronic Arts in 1992. In 1997, EA released Ultima Online, widely accepted as the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

Fast-forward to today, and Mythic Games, along with publisher EA, has created a loving tribute to the Ultima franchise with Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar. These days, most EA games are created with a free-to-play aesthetic, and Ultima Forever is no exception.

What’s surprising, however, is just how little that matters: Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar is a delightful top-down MMO that’s easy to play without spending a dime. Which, ironically, is the reason many of us will.

Take a moment and breathe. That’s what new, meditative space building sim rymdkapsel wants us to do. The concept here is to create and expand a space station (rymdkapsel means “space capsule” in Swedish), defending against waves of ever tougher alien spaceships. The goal is to survive as long as possible, reaching up to four monolith structures.

The game itself–originally released on Sony’s PlayStation Vita handheld–is hypnotic, slow-paced, and calming. There’s a strange sense of joy and peace that descends as players build their space station using Tetris-shaped block pieces, sending Pong-shaped minions to build new corridors, gather resources, research the monoliths, and take up arms to defend against the incoming waves of alien shooter ships.

Looks like the venerable video game company is looking to get in on some of GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragons action with Taito’s own arcade-music mashup iOS game, Groove Coaster Zero.

The two companies have just announced a new collaboration in which Groove Coaster Zero gets original and remixed background music from breakout hit Puzzle & Dragons as playable levels in Groove Coaster Zero. In addition, Puzzle & Dragons will get some special Groove Coaster Zero-themed dungeons along with classic Space Invader characters. That’s a mouthful, but super exciting, and it’s coming August 12.

Beaver Tap Games, comprised of Mike Meade and Mike Gaughen, has polished the speedrun hook game to a fine sheen. Echoing Rocketcat Games’ Hook Champ and Super QuickHook, the team’s first game, Mikey Shorts, garnered a ton of praise from critics and fans alike.

With this second release, Mikey Hooks, the team has again raised the bar for well designed levels, a whimsical art style, and a solid control scheme that works surprisingly well on the touch screen. Fans of the genre and newcomers alike will find plenty to love in this leveled speedrun platforming game.

Zepto Labs just released a new update for its popular Cut the Rope: Time Travel game. Now you can travel back in time to the Disco Era, complete with shiny disco balls and a groovy, disco-flavored soundtrack.

You’ll need to travel with Om Nom waaaaaay back in time to the world of the 1970s, meeting up with an ancestor who’s got all the moves, but one problem. All the spotlights in the era are destroying the candy. It’s up to you to cut the ropes and position a shiny disco ball to keep the spotlights from ruining all the sugary goodness.

Last week, The Drowning released on iOS to mixed reviews, many of which echoed our own. Most reviewers praised Scattered Entertainment’s control scheme but panned the gameplay itself as shallow and repetitive.

The game has been doing well, however, hitting the top five most downloaded free apps list on iPhone in 16 countries, and the top five free apps on iPad in 42 countries.

This week, then, The Drowning is getting a global in-game event: The Toxic Beast Hunt, letting players take part in a boss hunt together and compete for prizes, though to truly win, you’ll need to buy some gold.

One of Apple’s Best Apps of 2012, Pixowl’s The Sandbox is a fantastically inventive mobile game that encourages players to create entire worlds and works of art, right on their iOS or Android devices. The Sandbox has reached five million downloads across app stores, and has over 300,000 unique worlds shared in its Online Gallery. That’s a lot of stuff, folks!

The new update for iOS today brings vehicles to the pixel-based world-building game, letting you carry yourself and crafting materials in a Truck from one place to another much faster. Or, if you’re of a combative turn of mind, grab a Tank or twelve and create a battle world to experiences the horrors of war, digitally.

There are new, more advanced contraptions as well, like Conveyor Belts and Multi Electro contraptions, letting you create and manage even more complicated machines and systems within your world.

Holy crap, right? Robert Suarez dropped this amazing video up on YouTube, showing him beating the entire tower in under three minutes (2:58, to be exact), a full 32 seconds faster than the game developer’s own Game Center achievement.

There are some slight spoilers in the video, as it shows the entirety of the tower, from the bottom to the top level, with some cool avatars, power ups and the final boss. If you don’t want to see these things, preferring to work your own way up to the top, don’t watch the video.

For the rest of us, who know we’ll never be as good as this guy, it offers an incentive to keep plugging away at the game, which we reviewed favorably here.

We’ve contacted Robert via Twitter to find out how he got to this feat of Knightmare Tower awesomeness, and will update as we hear more.

Via: TouchArcade

Originally planned as a June 11 release, Sim City is now going to release on August 29, 2013, according to a tweet today from EA’s official SimCity Twitter account.

Joining another hotly-anticipated game release for the Mac, Bioshock Infinite, SimCity will hopefully be ready for prime time and not delayed again.

My kids and I have been watching episodes of Adventure Time, Cartoon Network’s disturbingly funny cartoon show. The adventures of Finn, Jake and a cast of crazy characters is compelling television, and hilarious on many different levels.

Legends of Ooo – Adventure Time originally launched for iOS last year in June, and while it provided some of the same fun and voiceover work as the cartoon show in a goofy little iOS package, it only came with one episode, “The Big Hollow Princess.”

This oversight has been corrected this past weekend with the release of the second episode, “The Library of Doom,” an all-new story and adventure game with new voice overs for the characters within. Even better, Episode 2 is absolutely free for a limited time as an in-app purchase. Shmow-zow!

If you haven’t gotten to check out The World Ends With You: Solo Remix yet, it’s completely understandable. Publisher Square Enix has a reputation for charging much more than the typical iOS game when it releases its popular games onto Apple’s touchscreen platform. It totally makes sense you might not want to pick it up for $17.99 for your iPhone, let alone $19.99 for your iPad.

If I said that the game, originally released to the dual-screen Nintendo DS, is completely worth every penny of the asking price, would you pick it up? Probably not.

But what if I said that both versions are now much less expensive, with the iPhone version in the App Store at $9.99 and the iPad version at $10.99? If you love innovative, brilliant gaming on the go, you’ll go grab a copy right now. Who knows how long the sale will last?

The endless runner genre continues to iterate across a variety of gaming apps for iOS, with clones and actual, unique ideas vying for the same space. Knightmare Tower, from Juicy Beast Studio, is one of the latter: a vertical endless runner with a twitchy, compelling take on the genre.

Players take on the role of a Knight, whose gameboy gaming session is interrupted by a letter from the local king. All of the king’s princess daughters have been captured by an evil skull, and must be rescued (sigh). Tired trope aside, the Knight leaps into action astride a wooden rocket ship, intent on flying to the top of the evil castle tower and rescuing a princess per level.

Adventure games are fantastic fun, but they tend to be a bit outdated. Even the newer ones seem to think that hunting for tiny little pixels in confusing images and combining bizarre objects together is the way to go.

Brazillian developer Pigasus Games thinks it’s high time we play adventure games that don’t force us to bend our minds to the will of some wacky game developer’s specific puzzles, but rather play something that combines emergent gameplay with a whole sandbox of tools to create our own adventure games. So they created Adventurezator, an emergent point-and-click adventure game with its own set of design and creation tools, made in Unity for Mac, PC, and Linux. Here’s what the devs have to say:

In Adventurezator, you not only play an ever-renewed pile of brilliantly designed point-and-click adventures: you actually get to design your own, and publish them too! The best part? You can do that without all that boring programming, or math. It’s all very technical, but (if we had to put it in layman’s terms) it works like a very fancy cable connected directly to your brilliance.

Double Fine’s Brütal Legend is out on the Mac App Store, and to celebrate, the publisher has dropped the price to a mere ten bucks. Considering that this game still retails for $15-$20 online, at least, this is a great deal.

Did I mention it also has Jack Black, Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Lita Ford, and an extra-helping of metalhead charm and Double Fine humor? Well, it does. If you’ve got a spare ten to, well, spare, then you should head on over to the Mac App Store and get yourself a copy before the price goes back up.

I play a lot of iOS games on iPhone and iPad. There are so many games out there, so much content, that it can be extremely difficult to find something you’ll like without having to download a ton of apps, try them out, and then discard them as they don’t quite scratch the itch you’re needing, well, scratched.

Free apps or paid apps, both cost something to download in time, cash, or both. So, I figured, why not start doing some of the heavy lifting here, and help you find fantastic games to play, without all the work?

That said, I found a gem of a game this week, and it’s only $0.99, with no further in-app purchases (IAP) to sully the experience. Blitz Block Robo is a fantastic little game that hits all the right notes.

Let’s get this out of the way right up front, ok? Scattered Entertainment’s The Drowning is a drop-dead gorgeous free-to-play game with a well-designed control scheme that (almost) makes playing a first-person shooter (FPS) worthwhile on a touchscreen. This is, in fact, an important release for those three facts alone.

Ultimately, though, the game suffers as a direct result, I think, of these very same features. I went into the game expecting to find at least some console-level depth in storyline, level design, and the like. What I found, however, was much less interesting.

One of the finer console ports to date, XCOM: Enemy Unknown has been raising expectations of mobile gamers since its release last month. It’s almost the exact same game as its Mac, PC, and console versions, bringing deep strategic gameplay and a brilliantly conceived science fictional world to the iOS platform.

Today, though, XCOM: Enemy Unknown got an update, and a bit of a price drop. It’s now $14.99, down from $19.99, and has a whole new way to play: Second Wave.

Two guys named Mike met up on the TouchArcade forums a few years back and bonded over their love of retro platform games with a hook. A literal hook, to be specific.

Mike Meade and Mike Gaughen competed with each other to see who was the best Hook Champ player, moving on to challenge each other over Super QuickHook. When those speed runs came to an end, the two Mikes decided to make their own hooking endless runner, and Mikey Shorts, an App Store Best of 2012, was born.

On Thursday, August 8, the long-awaited sequel is set to release in the App Store. Mikey Hooks aims to be everything Mikey Shorts was and more, with a host of new ideas and features to keep us all jumping and hooking our way to joy.

Released last month, Kingdom Rush: Frontiers is the followup to the critically-acclaimed Kingdom Rush, one of my personal favorites in the Tower Defense genre, what with its cute little hand-drawn characters, wacky sense of humor, and some of the most finely-tuned tower defense levels I’ve ever played.

Kindgom Rush: Frontiers, then, just got a marine-flavored update today with six new nautical-themed creeps to defend against, two new heroes to deploy when things get rough, and some extra maps and achievements to keep you entertained far beyond the already stellar gameplay of the original release.

Video games are often praised right out of the gate due to their amazing graphical fidelity and smooth animation. A less visible but equally important feature of any game, especially in the realm of first-person shooters, is the control scheme.

DeNA / Mobage’s The Drowning, out today as a universal iOS app, has seemingly nailed both of these things in a game that’s taking the iOS gaming world by storm. And perhaps shotgun.

The developer behind incredibly successful free to play iOS game, Puzzles & Dragons, is back with a new free to play title called Freak Tower.

Launching the game for the first time allows prospective tower builders to walk through a tutorial that gives a decent overview of the game. The idea here is to build a tower, one floor up at a time, and fight off various monsters that climb said tower to steal the food that’s dubiously placed on the roof.

Id Software’s seminal first-person shooter franchise, Doom, came to the iOS platform back in 2009, with Doom Classic. It debuted as a $6.99 game, and we were all willing to pay for admission to a game that stole our hearts (and our free time) as young gamers.

About a year later, Doom II RPG showed up on the App Store at $3.99. It’s the sequel to 2005’s Doom RPG, a turn-based, more strategic take on the Doom universe.

Both titles are a part of gaming history, and they’re both available for $0.99 on the app store today. How long will they stay at this low price? Who knows? Not us.

Rovio’s point and click puzzler, Tiny Thief, has just dropped in price from $2.99 to $0.99. That’s not a bad discount, and it’s happening right now for we don’t know how long.

It just might be time to jump on this one, then, as Tiny Thief is a great game.