gaming - page 48

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The classic German board game Carcassone has finally come to the iPhone with an official port including original artwork, eight different AI players, a cool looking solitaire mode and Internet multiplayer with push notifications.

From the App Store description: “Build a medieval landscape, tile by tile, claim landmarks with your followers and score points. As a winner of the prestigious “Spiel des Jahres” award in 2001, the game allows for a plethora of play styles and strategies.”

The game’s iPhone-only for now, but a universal iPad version is imminent.

I’ve never played Carcassone but it is a game much beloved by my board-gaming friends. I’ve been eager to get my teeth into this one.

Carcassone can be purchased on the App Store now for just $4.99

Paper Toss for iPhone is a brilliant pick-up-and-play game that is guaranteed to kill some time when you’re waiting for your train, when your boss is out of the office, or when you’re waiting for your little ones to give up the TV. If you’re one of the 21,000,000 paper tossers out there, you’ll be pleased to know the game is now available on the iPad, including a new level and improved visuals for the larger screen. But is it worth that $2.99 price tag?

Super Monkey Ball was one of the first games that introduced us to the possibilities of gaming on the iPhone & iPod Touch when it was previewed back in March 2008, along with the announcement of the App Store. As the biggest selling game on launch day, Sega set the standard for other 3D games with superb graphics, an intuitive control system and incredibly fun gameplay. Now Super Monkey Ball 2: Sakura Edition is available on the iPad, so does this super-sized version live up to the expectations we’ve come to expect from those little monkeys?

If you’re a fan of games like Minigore or Guerilla Bob, then developers GameLab have a treat in store for you – Pirate’s Treasure for iPhone and iPod Touch – boasting stunning 3D graphics, all-out blasting mayhem and bosses too massive to fit on the screen, this game will certainly keep you entertained!

No, you can’t play as one of Bruce Lee’s more credible doppelgangers — the venerable Tekken series’ whip-quick Marshall Law — until Namco gets its act together and releases an iPhone version. But y’know what — nothing compares to the real thing.

Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior — which according to its press release has been given the official stamp of approval from the Bruce Lee Foundation (run by Lee’s daughter, Shannon) and even models the computer-generated Lee using motion capture from one of Lee’s students — is probably as close to Enter The Dragon as anything on the iPhone or iPad is going to get. At $5, the iPhone version’s a little on the pricey side, but the reverse is true for the iPad’s HD version — which is, oddly enough, also $5.

And if we can work up enough nerve to channel Bruce through one of our devices, you might just see a review here soon.

First released in 1989, Jordan Mechner’s swashbuckling classic The Prince of Persia is now available on the App Store.

Called Prince of Persia Retro, the game puts you in the roll of the eponymous hero, who only has one hour to defeat the villainous vizier Jaffar and rescue the imprisoned princess to save the day.

The iPhone version costs $0.99, and if you’re the type who likes spamming your Facebook friends with pointless updates… it’ll do that for you too. Go grab it if you’ve got any love of the original: this is a great port, and it’s nice to see one of the best games for the Apple II restored for the iPhone.

Valve Software has just announced that their revolutionary shooter Half-Life 2 will be coming to Steam for Mac later today… and to promote it, they’ve released this incredible Half-Life 2 themed riff on Apple’s own seminal “1984” advertisement, with City 17 resistant fighter Alyx flinging the series’ iconic crowbar through the televised face of the Big-Brother-like Walter Breen.

Absolutely brilliant. As for Half-Life 2, the Steam release marks the first time that the game has been playable under OS X for the last six years. At this point, the game is a little long-in-the-tooth, and Valve has released much better games like Portal and Left 4 Dead II since then, this is a great opportunity to play a classic.

Price is still unknown, although the PC version costs $20 on Steam, so unless Valve offers Half-Life 2 at a discount, that’s probably what you can expect to pay.

Capcom’s fantastic series of lawyerly anime adventure titles, the Ace Attorney series, have been delighting gamers on Nintendo’s handhelds since 2001… and now the first game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is available to download through iTunes.

The iPhone version of Phoenix Wright is basically a direct port of the Nintendo DS version, with the lower half of the iPhone screen standing in for the DS’ lower display. Otherwise, though, the two games are identical, and as a long-time fan of the series, this is an easy game to recommend if you like quirk, tongue-in-cheek gravitas and cheeky mysteries to solve.

You can buy Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on the App Store now for just $4.99.

We’ve raved about Hippo Remote Pro so enthusiastically, one would think it were made of gold-pressed latinum; that’s because it’s probably one of the (if not the) best soft-remote app currently available for the iPhone.

And now it’s better: Its developers have added a heavily customizable gamepad function — cool for watching the life being sucked from that annoying Blood Elf rogue on a 52-inch HDTV while laying about on the couch with a mojito (or a rootbeer float, if you’re so inclined/underaged). Of course, that’s in additon to the trackpad function and oodles of application-specific profiles for Hulu, Plex, Chrome, and the rest it already comes with.

Hippo Remote Pro is $5; there’re also Basic ($2) and free versions, but neither of those include the gamepad.

There’s plenty of tower defense games available for the iPhone, pitting players against wave after wave of enemies as varied as robots, zombies and monsters, but Fluffylogic’s foray into the genre is sure to pique the interests of any geek who has ever watched The Empire Strikes Back.

Star Wars: The Battle For Hoth puts iPhone gamers in charge of repelling the Imperial advance with heavy weapon soldier, 1.4 FD P-Tower Laser Cannons and X-Wing Control Towers, while the Empire is provisioned with Viper Probe Droids, Snowtroopers, 74-Z Speeder Bikes, AT-ST Walkers, TIE Fighters, and hulking At-AT Walkers.

Brilliant. The Battle for Hoth is the scenario the tower defense genre was practically invented to simulate. There’s no explicit word on release date or price right now, but Fluffylogic says Star Wars: Battle for Hoth’s release is “imminent,” so keep refreshing the App Store.

Even the iPhone isn’t powerful enough yet to run Blizzard’s fanatically popular World of Warcraft MMORPG, but thanks to the World of Warcraft Armory App has long given the mobile night elf or orc alike the ability to access their characters’ stats, check the leaderboards, browse items or calculate their talents.

A forthcoming update to the Armory App finally adds in a long-requested killer feature: the ability to use the auction house out of game. The feature is called Remote Auction House, and it allows you to browse the auction house for free out of game, or to pay an extra subscription price of $3 per month to buy, create or re-list items without ever logging into your Mac.

The subscription fee is a bold move, but Blizzard has proved time and time again that the die-hards raiders will keep ponying up. I’ve known more than a few gamers in my time who spend hours a day in the Auction House: a few bucks a month to allow them to do their auction grinding on the subway or at the park would, to them, be a small price to pay for a little more sunshine in their lives.

The updated app is now out, but the Remote Auction House functionality hasn’t yet been pushed live. Expect it soon.

The original Prince of Persia, first released for the Apple II back in 1989, is now coming to the iPhone according to Ubisoft’s website.

Called Prince of Persia Retro, there’s not many details available about the port, except that it will be a universary binary for the iPad and (obviously) support touch controls.

Fantastic news. Mac gamers! PopCap Games’ entire library of 13 incredible Mac games is now available for the lump sum of just $50.

Sure, the app store is swimming in trivia quiz games, but Qrank is different — and ever since the game raised its shiny little head up off the App Store floor earlier this month it’s had us hooked like sugar junkies to a candy factory.

the free app cranks (you knew it had to be in here) out a fresh quiz every day, and you’re only allowed one crack at it per day, which is one big reason why it’s as addictive as, well, crack. That, and the way the game connects players socially — everyone has to answer the same questions, which makes it easy to let your friends know you’re smarter than them.

If you don’t have friends, the game publicly ranks you against everyone else playing that day, so you can be smarter than your state, the nation — or the whole world.

What it is: We Rule is an addictive world-building iPhone game that blends Sim City with Facebook’s Farmville. Set in medieval times, you must build a prosperous kingdom by micromanaging the peasants and expanding trade with other online players.

Why it’s good: The game blends the best empire-building aspects of Sim City with the social aspects of Farmville.

As a teenager, I was totally addicted to games like Sid Meier’s Civilization, and Sim City. Even though they had terrible graphics and long load times on my old Pentium 1 PC, the sense of being a ‘god’ and having power over all those little guys made it a deep and immersive experience. Now Ngmoco has brought this gaming experience to the iPhone.

Steam has arrived for your Intel chipped Mac with an impressive list of titles for your playing pleasure. We have been anxiously awaiting this contemporary gaming standard’s arrival and I for one am pleased with the titles made immediately available.

Diablo-esque Torchlight is half price at $9.99. If you want to test out Steam’s prowess without  having to spend your allowance you can download Valve’s puzzler Portal for FREE until May 24th. I know it sounds too good to be true but this cleverly worded promo page backs me up.

Head over to Joystiq.com to check out the list of titles and download link.

Two of my favorite gadgets to hit up when rec time rolls around are my iPhone and my mountain bike. Combining the two together might result in a sort of Shangri-la-like experience, but until now the only option available to me would have been something like the almost surely life-threatening activity of negotiating twisty singletrack while attempting to score the next mining license in Space Miner.

But the new Xtreme Sports: Biker iPhone app seems a saner alternative that’ll have much less impact on my health insurance. The first-person freeride mountain-bike simulator rolls out 25 levels across forest, mountain, urban, winter and park environments — all for a buck. Pretty sick, dude.

I haven’t tried it yet, but if I actually get to the point where my time is free, it seems a good bet I’ll be trading a dollar for a ride.

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Macs do bundles better than anyone, but if you’re a Mac gamer, the Humble Indie Bundle might be the best one yet. Not only do you get to name your price for five amazing Mac indie games worth $80 — World of Goo, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture and Aquaria — but you get too choose if you want your money to go to support Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or line the developers’ pockets with filthy lucre.

Right now, the average contribution for the pack is just $7.87, with the total money raised over $360,000. I’m sure Cult of Mac readers can push that average contribution number up a few sense: these games, these developers and these charities are all worth your money.

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As the resident sadomasochist in love with roguelike games, I’ve been waiting for months for Dinofarm Games to release their lovingly crafted take on the genre, 100 Rogues. Now they have, and it’s available on the App Store for $4.99! Kalloo! Kallay!

What you see here isn’t World of Warcraft running natively on the iPad, but rather WoW streamed through the Gaikai online gaming service, which allows you to play games within your browser using HTML5 and their server streaming technology. In other words, it’s a thin client.

I imagine this is pretty maddening to play — WoW depends on a mouse and keyboard — but if thin clients get big enough, developers will start programming for iPad-based input, even for non-native games. As a reformed WoW addict, I hope to god that doesn’t happen: I don’t need another reason to start back up.

If you’re interested in the possibilities here, you can sign up for Gaikai’s private beta here.

[via MacStories]

Want to know when you’ll be sliding through the orange hued inkwell of a counter-gravitational portal on your Mac? Eager to know the date when you can start the fight against the insidious Combine under OS X? Fanatic about headshotting bile-spitting zombie after zombie within the safehouse of Snow Leopard? Keen to whack a bald, minigun-toting fat man in the back of the head with a baseball bat while cracking wise to him in a Brooklyn accent?

Sure you are, and when Valve gets around to releasing Steam for Mac, you can do just that through native Source-engine ports of games like Left 4 Dead, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal just by downloading them through their games delivery service. And just when are they planning on releasing Steam for Mac to good gamers across the world? We now have a date: May 12th.

Had enough curling? Of course not! No one ever gets sick of curling (and if they do, they’re surreptitiously hauled off to Scotland/Canada/Sweden and fed a steady diet of haggis/mapled moose/IKEA furniture until they recant or end up completely insane, or both).

That’s why we’re pretty excited to see iCurling come to the iPhone. Unfortunately, as much as I’d like to slather this post in sarcasm, the graphics look slick and the app’s only a buck; pretty sure that flaming stone isn’t regulation though.

With Gizmodo’s leaked fourth-generation prototype confirming both front and back-facing video cameras in the next iPhone, we can now take it as read that video conferencing is coming to iPhone OS, as the 3.2 and Beta 4 SDKs have long hinted.

So what kind of software video features can we expect in the next iPhone? MacRumors has taken a close look at the latest build.

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of Steam for Mac since it was first announced back in early March, but Valve has continued to be mum about their games delivery platform’s Mac-specific details. An informative thread on the official Steam forums, though, has a lot of information about what Mac gamers can expect when Steam for Mac lands in May.