gaming - page 50

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If you’d told me yesterday that I’d be eagerly anticipating a new release by nu metal doofus band Linkin Park, I would have promptly puked up my entire central nervous system… but today, I’m holding my stomach, keeping my mouth closed and my nostrils pinched shut, because Linkin Park’s upcoming iPhone game doesn’t just look good… it looks fantastic.

Perhaps what’s so great about Linkin Park 8-Bit Rebellion is that it somehow manages to cater to both Linkin Park fans (a blight on the species which makes a strong argument for eugenics) and those who find the band’s metal-and-rap-for-fratties musical style nauseating in equal measure. It’s a game with a sense of humor about its subject, not exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from Linkin Park.

The game pits the members of Linkin Park in 16-bit pixel art glory, battling an infection of 8-bit sprites with fun weapons ranging from flamethrowers to super lasers. Even better: Linkin Park’s oeuvre of unlistenable audiophonic vomit is taken and distilled until each song has become a fun, warbling chiptune, which you can choose to listen to instead. Excellent!

Even Linkin Park haters like me should check out the trailer above: this may be the iPhone game I’m looking forward to most right now, god help me.

Eager to plunge your Companion Cube through a gravity-defying dimensional riff in pursuit of the ephemeral promise of imaginary cake? Dying to invisibly sneak up on a sandwich-munching Heavy and slide a butterfly knife between his vertrebrae? Have a zombie-killing date scheduled with three buddies in New Orleans’ French district? Want to do all of it on your Mac?

Well, good news! Valve Software’s games delivery service, Steam, is now accepting Mac beta testers. It’s easy to sign up: all you need to do is go to the page and log in with your Steam user name and password. A quick poll and system check later, and you’ll be officially entered.

I’ve entered, and so should you: perhaps a Cult of Mac Left 4 Dead II multiplayer night is in our future later this month.

This week hasn’t heralded any major App Store gaming releases, so this weekend, in the wake of the inamorata’s shamelessly bragged-about decimation of my all-time high score, I’ll be revisiting an old iPhone favorite: GeoSpark ($1.99) by Critical Thought Games.

Star Wars titles on the iPhone tend to be bog-standard, lightsaber-swishing affairs, but THQ Wireless looks like they finally might have a Star Wars game in development that’s worth picking up: Star Wars Cantina.

As the title perhaps implies, this is a light-hearted simulation of running a cantina at the famous Mos Eisley Spaceport.

According to the official blurb, “Your task is to see that the right beverage finds its way to the right customer. And don’t keep them waiting, some of the customers are real troublemakers! Working towards your daily quota, accuracy and speed are essential. As a reward for a job well done, outfit your cantina with decorations and attractions to appeal to even the most difficult customers.”

Star Wars Cantina should be coming to the App Store soon. It looks great. Now what about the HD version?

Digital is… well, what is it exactly?

Officially, it’s “a computer mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988”. It’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac, and it’s a joy for old-timers like me to behold.

What you see when you start Digital is how computers used to be. Back in the days when Cult of Mac would have been a roughly-stapled fanzine sold for 50 cents a copy (please send a stamped addressed envelope).

But it’s more than a nostalgia trip. It’s something else. Built by Ontario-based author Christine Love, Digital promises much more than just nostalgia. You might even get to save the world by exploiting a buffer overflow. That’s how old-school nerd superheroes used to do things.

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Ported and expanded from the popular Amiga shareware game Deluxe Galaga by the original author, Edgar Vigdal, the 2D space SHMUP Warblade features well over 100 levels, multiple power-ups and dozens of enemies. Without a doubt, its one of the best Galaga-inspired arcade shooters on OS X… and now it’s heading to the App Store.

Most SHMUPs require extremely precise controls, but Warblade is no danmaku, and the game’s level design is forgiving enough that it looks like the iPhone’s touchscreen will work out pretty well. Vigdal claims that the port is 80% done, so we should see it on the App Store soon.

I’m pretty excited: the App Store seems woefully short on good SHMUPS. Until someone gets around to porting Cho Ren Sha 68K to the iPhone, Warblades looks like it’ll be the best SHMUP gaming on the Apple handheld is going to get.

On Friday, we started something new here at Cult of Mac: we asked you what iPhone games you were playing that we might recommend for our weekend gaming feature.

On our part, we recommended Space Miner: Space Ore Bust, a humorous, lite RPG spin on Asteroids.

Here’s some of the games you recommended that tickled our fancy.

In the wee hours of the morning, Nintendo very quietly announced the successor to its wildly successful line of Nintendo DS gaming handhelds: the Nintendo 3DS.

Following Nintendo’s recent trend of embracing bold and unconventional gaming hardware (e.g. the Nintendo Wii’s motion-sensing controls, or the original Nintendo DS’s dual screen / touchscreen approach) the 3DS, as its name implies, promises to bring full 3D without glasses to handheld gaming.

What’s of interest to the announcement for Apple fans, though, is the timing. Like many tech companies, Nintendo tends to announce its biggest products at industry events. The Nintendo DS is such a wild success for the company, they’d be sure to announce their follow-up handheld at a major expo, such as May’s E3 Expo.

Instead, though, Nintendo chose to announce the 3DS with a terse press release and a promise to give more details in May…. following right on the heels of a report that shows that the iPhone and iPod Touch have claimed 19% of the handheld gaming market from Nintendo, thanks to the App Store, in only 21 months.

This announcement has all the hallmarks of a hastily made pacifying gesture to Nintendo investors alarmed by Apple’s unexpected success in the handheld gaming market: “Don’t worry, we’re not resting on our laurels, we’ve got something new up our sleeves.”

I’m eagerly anticipating E3’s 3DS announcements. My guess is that the App Store has changed the mobile gaming development scene forever, and an integral part to Nintendo’s own strategy will be to extend their WiiWare downloadable games service to the 3DS while opening it up to public submissions.

No one here’s going to argue that the App Store can’t be arbitrary and borderline tyrannical… but you know, sometimes developers get what’s coming to them: Zits & Giggles, a high-brow dermatological simulator, has been pulled from the App Store after its creator, Tommy Refenes, told an audience at San Francisco’s Game Developer Conference that he “absolutely f***ing hate(s) the iPhone App Store.” And that f-bomb ain’t “fudge.”

Of course, there’s more to this than that. Refenes seems to have had an axe to grind with Apple, having raised Zits & Giggles price from $0.99 to $15.99 to $299.99 to $399.99 over a period of about six months. Shockingly, the app still managed to sell fourteen copies at the price of $299.99.

What was the point of all of this? To prove how crummy the App Store is because it’s not aimed at “real gamers,” apparently.

“My conclusion to all of this is that the people you’re selling games to on the App store, they’re not necessarily gamers. There are some games that sell very well on the App store, but for the most part, when you have stuff like Street Fighter and Assassin’s Creed, the are a way to sell a brand, just like the Tiger handhelds were,” said Refenes.

Something tells me that Apple couldn;t really care less about some punk kid mouthing off, and this is really about selling a zit-bursting simulator for more than the cost of a real-life visit to a dermatologist.

Whatever, though: I think this is one zit on Apple’s backside we’re all perfectly happy to see excised.

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Revolutionary Concepts (who also did the excellent port of the early 80s’ laser disc game Cobra Commandhave just released a trailer for their forthcoming iPhone game, Frogman.

Basically, take the gameplay of Konami’s classic coin-op arcade game Frogger, plop it in a bright, cartoony 3D world and turn the eponymous amphibian into a superhero whose origins owe as much to Seth Brundle as they do to Ben Edlund.

It looks fantastic: as the developers state, “[It’s] Frogger’s 3rd Cousin Twice Removed – on Steroids!” There’s even an iPad version coming. For guys like me, who always loved Frogger, but wanted more levels, this looks like just the ticket. Here’s hoping it hits the App Store soon.

It’s Friday, and we’re all a little tired, so welcome to a new weekly whatever here on Cult of Mac, where we’ll spend Friday afternoon feverishly anticipating the forthcoming weekend to be spent gaming on our iPhones with a beer balanced on our bellies. Let us know what you’re playing on your iPhone in the comments and we’ll showcase some of the more interesting recommendations next week.

As for me, I’m playing Space Miner: Space Ore Bust: an Asteroids clone fused with an addictive RPG upgrade mechanic and a quirky sense of humor that good-naturedly vivisects the usual sci-fi plot tropes. In fact, while the graphics and gameplay are great, it’s really the humor that sets the game apart: Space Miner’s the rarity of a genuinely funny game, with the character design and quirkily ironic banter of a Tim Schaffer game.

For that matter, Space Miner’s a rarity for me in that it’s a campaign-based iPhone game I’ve beaten, then immediately picked up again for a second playthrough. My only complaint of the $2.99 title is that I wish the core campaign was longer: while Space Miner took me a meaty six hours to beat the first time around, and while the game encourages multiple playthroughs, giving up my end game nuclear war cruiser for the early game’s wimpily pew-pewing jalopy was a hard thing indeed.

What about you? What will you be playing this weekend?

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While not a Final Fantasy game per se, Square-Enix’s latest game Chaos Rings (to be released sometime soonish for the iPhone and iPod Touch) has all the hallmarks of their most famous series of JRPGs.

A white-haired protagonist wielding a sword bigger than the length of his body? Check. NPCs androgynously envisioned by character designer Testuya Nomura? Yup. Being slurped into random battles every three steps? Uh huh. And I’m guessing we can expect a ten minute cutscene or two as well.

No word yet on when this is dropping on the App Store, but the Japanese trailer above says “soon” and the trailer itself looks remarkably polished. I imagine we’ll see it within a month or two.

About a hundred years ago, while I was still a Windows user and thought that a Mac was what you covered in a cheese and slurped down for lunch, I whiled away way too much time playing a DOS-based artillery duel game called Scorched Earth. Dot Matrix Interactive Designs have created their own version in the extremely polished, multiplayer KIL.A.TON — and it’s even more of a blast to play.

Although most famously known for his system-crushing, next-gen 3D engines, id software’s John Carmack has been a passionate enthusiast of iPhone app development. He’s personally cited the platform as a return to the older school of game design, where a single enthusiast can turn out a great game in a matter of a couple months, and id software’s (excellent) iPhone ports of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were basically pet projects of Carmack himself.

No surprise, then, that Carmack is interested in the iPad. Speaking to Kotaku, Carmack said: “”Apple doesn’t give us anything ahead of time either, so haven’t put hands on it ourselves, but we certainly are expecting to try to have our Rage title for the iPhone, iPad, whatever, working across there.”

Rage is id’s upcoming post-apocalyptic, Mad Max inspired FPS and racing game, the first title to be released running id’s bleeding edge id Tech 5 engine. I’m not buying that the iPad has the oomph to run Rage at all: rather, I imagine that he is talking about bringing a spin-off title to the iPhone and iPad, similarly to the way Doom Resurrection brought Doom 3 to the App Store.

Either way, it’s exciting news, and Carmack remains as mouthbreathingly charming as an uber-dork as he could possibly be: the id software founder says that, given his druthers, he wants to budget a couple of months into every year where he can just disappear into his programming lair and code iPhone games.

As a Mac gamer, I thought the recent announcement of the Steam digital games delivery service coming to Mac was very exciting. Even if Steam never becomes as popular on the Mac as it is on the PC, it will bring us, at the very least, some great Valve titles like Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead and Portal.

But best case scenario? Steam on Mac gets just the same vibrant games economy that the PC version enjoyed. But to do that, developers need to be on board.

Luckily, it looks like at least two game developing studios are going to take the plunge. Gas Powered Games, who created Supreme Commander 2 and Dungeon Siege, plan to develop for Mac in all products going forward, saying that porting games to the Mac is relatively easy since they’ve got identical internal architectures, unlike the PowerPC days. Unfortunately, that sounds to me like they’re talking about using CrossOver to make their ports. DICE is also now talking more seriously about bringing their Battlefield series of games to the Mac as well.

The big risk here is that developers will choose to use CrossOver or other DirectX wrappers to do their ports, which is the last thing the Mac gaming scene needs. I hope Steam leads to developers seriously devoting time and resources to OS X game development… not just an expansion of the lazy porting we’ve seen over the last few years.

Forget Plants vs. Zombies… how about Tweets vs. Zombies?

Tweet Defense is a cute little tower defense game for the iPhone and iPod Touch that boosts your units power based on your Twitter activity, including status updates and number of followers, as you fight off wave after wave of the undead. A Twitter account is not strictly obligatory, but if you have one, your Twitter statistics will boost your units in various ways: for example, rate of fire, range and damage increases.

According to Tweet Defense’s executive producer, Nelson Rodriguez: “We wondered what it would be like to take your social network and your activities there and turn it into a game. We ended up with a full on tower defense game that uses your friend list and your tweeting activity to impact how powerful your towers are.”

It certainly looks like fun, and at $0.99 on the iTunes App Store, Tweet Defense is easily within the impulse buy category. Now if only I had more Twitter followers to boost my range.

This is kind of a no-brainer once you actually think about it, but according to Mobclix, a mobile device advertising agency, the number of eBooks available on the App Store has surpassed the number of games for the first time ever, with 27,000 eBook apps to 25,400 games.

The reason here is pretty simple: there’s little barrier to entry in releasing an eBook app. All you do is grab a public domain title, wrap it in a remedial interface, slap a $0.99 price on it and hope for the best. Once you’ve programmed the wrapper, you can pump out eBook titles like this quickly and indefinitely, making it an easy moneymaker for more unscrupulous App Devs. Games, on the other hand, require you to have more advanced programming, artistic and design ideas.

For me, the most interesting aspect to this data is what it means for the iPad. Apple wants you to do all of your eBook reading in the iBooks app, but companies like Penguin are already talking about doing a lot of their more interesting work in app form. The eBook glut on the App Store can’t be something Apple wants to encourage to continue when the iPad comes around, but major publishers are doing the same thing.

My guess is we’ll start seeing a purge of crap eBook apps shortly after the iPad’s release. I’m okay with that… as long as they don’t touch my beloved Stanza.

Hadouken! I hope you’ve been practicing your hurricane kicks and lightning cannonballs, because Capcom’s much anticipated port of its beloved Street Fighter IV fighter is now available for $9.99 over on the App Store.

Yesterday, Valve yawned open its PR orifice and finally confirmed the huge Mac gaming development that everyone already knew was coming: they’re bringing the Steam digital delivery service to OS X. Today, from that same orifice, we have more details, including the games we can expect to see released next month.

“Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April,” the company has confirmed.

Even better? As hinted, you’ll be able to use the same product key to download and play both PC and Mac versions of the same title.

“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge,” says the company.

A small bit, this, but almost totally unprecedented in Mac gaming, where ports of PC titles inevitably require a separate purchase. Also nearly unprecedented: Mac and Windows players will both be part of the same multiplayer universe, which means they’ll be able to play on the same servers.

Even better news? Valve has said that they’re treating the Mac as a “Tier 1” platform, which means that, from now on, the company will release its own games at the same time as on the PC and Xbox 360. Portal 2 will be the first game to be released simultaneously on the Mac, PC and 360.

Of course, there’s a lot up in the air here… Steam’s not just about Valve games, and if other companies don’t start releasing native ports for OS X (as opposed to the cheap and sluggish practice of dropping them in DirectX wrappers and slapping a $50 price tag on the resulting .DMG), Steam for Mac will never get more traction. Let’s hope Valve’s investment into OS X finally convinces game developers to embrace the fastest growing home computing market out there.

After Street Fighter, Tekken’s one of the biggest fighting game franchises around. It’s no surprise, then, that the iconic Namco brawler would be quick to follow Capcom’s Street Fighter IV as an iPhone-specific port.

There’s nothing official yet, but according to Pocket Gamer, an anonymous source has told them that iPhone and iPod Touch owners can expect the Iron Fist Tournament to come to their handhelds soon.

Of course, when “soon” is is still very much up in the air, although it is apparently in the final phases of development. Hopefully, Namco will figure out a less obtrusive control scheme for Tekken than the Street Fighter IV‘s fighter-obscuring overlays.

Well, it looks like it’s official: after accidentally leaking the existence of a Mac client in their latest beta, and teasing the same in a series of hysterical promotional images, Valve has announced that the Steam games delivery service will indeed be coming to OS X… along with the sequel to their nabacularly terrific teleportation puzzler, Portal.

One of the greatest things about App Store games is that they’ve broken the seemingly relentless escalation of costs for developers and price-increases for end users. In a sense, many of the games on the store return us to the halcyon days of 8-bit games—playable, quickfire efforts that innovated and packed in plenty of personality.

Over at creature24.com, three guys are about to take this idea to the extreme, taking a skeleton idea for an iPhone game through to App Store submission—all in just 24 hours. Progress will be shown live on the website on March 6, starting at 9:00am EST, and the trio of devs say comments from visitors might even be integrated into the game. I caught up with one of the three crazy game creators, Binary Hammer‘s Bob Koon, to find out more.

We reported two weeks ago that Capcom was planning on bringing Street Fighter 4, to the App Store despite the iPhone and iPod Touch’s lack of waggling physical controls… but now we can see exactly how the iconic fighting game will play on Apple’s line-up of touchscreen handsets thanks to a recently released trailer.

We already knew Valve was bringing its popular Steam games delivery service to OS X thanks to some Mac-specific files floating around the latest PC beta, but you can now pretty much take it as read: the Half-Life 2 developer has been releasing a slew of images slathering the Apple coating across their most popular gaming franchise.

So far, Valve has released images of Half-Life 2‘s Gordon Freeman wearing an iMacified HEV suit, replete with Apple logo instead of the Black Mesa Lambda symbol; the Team Fortress 2 Heavy eating a sandwich in the style of the dancing silhouette iPod ads; turrets from both Team Fortress 2 and Portal (a game which boasts a very Mac-inspired visual design scheme) doing the “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” dance; Left 4 Dead’s Francis mocking the iconic “Think Different” series of ads; a Steam-specific take-off of the first “Introducing Macintosh” advertisement (courtesy of RPS); and Half-Life 2’s Alyx transported into the famous “1984” commercial (via Macworld).

We’ve got all the images after the jump, At the barest minimum, though, OS X is about to get a proper digital delivery platform for games, and native ports of Valve’s greatest games. Rare good news indeed for the dedicated Mac gamer.

There’s reason enough to arch a wry eyebrow at yet another classic platformer with a virtual control overlay ported to the App Store, and Gameloft’s newest iPhone gaming release, Rayman 2: The Great Escape is no exception, even at $6.99.