Here in Arizona, the general rule is to keep our hands away from anything that sounds like it has even the remotest chance of being prickly or having fangs. Strange then, that my fingers seem magnetically drawn to the triadic snake emblem on the palmrest of Razer’s Orochi Bluetooth mouse. The little sleek black gadget is like crack for my hand.
A potentially revolutionary way to stream next-gen video games to hardware technically too underpowered to run those titles natively, thin client OnLive might be the best thing to happen to gaming since, well, the Internet.
Essentially, the technology works by making a game into an interactive, streaming video, rendering all the gameplay on a beefy server, compressing the video and shooting it off to you as you play. Imagine, for example, playing a shooter like Crysis — which can cripple even a top-of-the-line PC — on your iPhone. Actually, scratch that, because you don’t really have to: at this year’s DICE Summit in Las Vegas, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman gave a brief demonstration of Crysis running on Apple’s handheld.
If the idea of playing full-featured, next-gen games on your iPhone doesn’t get you excited, it gets better: Perlman has also confirmed that OnLive will support tablets, clearly giving a wink and a nod to the iPad.
The only question is: will OnLive be able to solve the latency issues inherent in the thin client gaming approach? Perlman swears it’s feasible, as long as each OnLive user is within 100 miles of a server, but a high ping’s a deadly thing in an FPS. OnLive could very well be a revolution… but at the end of the day, I think we’ll be more likely to be playing slower-paced games like Civilization V through our iPad OnLive client than Crysis.
In the 1980s, a Mario-like platformer was reportedly brutally slain by Nintendo lawyers. Two decades later, the game has made its way to iPhone and iPod touch (and, presumably, Nintendo’s lawyers have chilled out a little). The game in question: Giana Sisters. Cult of Mac spoke to Nico Kaartinen of developer Bad Monkee about how and why a cult 8-bit classic was remade for Apple handhelds.
I’ve always been fond of the Rolando series by Ngmoco: I think they were the first App Store games that showed me that the iPhone could be just as serious a gaming platform as the Nintendo DS or PSP.
I really liked the first couple of games, which is why it’s a shame that Ngmoco is now telling IGN that they are cancelling the third game, essentially because they can’t make it a “freemium” title.
What they mean by that is that Ngmoco wants all of their games to be free to download through the App Store, and they will make their money selling in-app purchases like extra levels, characters, etc. They’ve had great luck with this model with their Eliminate Pro shooter… but they just can’t figure out how to make this model work for Rolando 3.
It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me: surely, Rolando 3 could make its development budget back even without the “freemium” aspect, and I don’t really understand why Ngmoco can’t just sell expansion levels and different skins if they are intent on the freemium model.
Either way, it’s sad: the Rolando games are still really cute, and I’ll always remember them as the titles that first got me to take the iPhone seriously as a gaming handset.
I’ve always had trouble explaining my addiction to Keita Takahashi’s surrealist puzzle-action game Katamari Damacy to people who have never had the psychotropic thrill of rolling up a giant ball of cows, schooners and sea monsters for the approval of the binge-drinking, rainbow-clad King of All Cosmos.
If you’re one of those people, and if that last sentence didn’t make a lick of sense to you, then I’m going to have an even harder time describing Takahashi’s follow-up title, Noby Noby Boy, in which the worm-like, quadrupedal BOY must stretch his ever-lengthening abdominal section across the map to reach his one true love, GIRL. So let’s just leave it at the fact that a port of Noby Noby Boy has hit the iTunes App Store for $1.99 and call it a day, shall we?
Except I really can’t, because Noby Noby Boy looks like a very different game on the iPhone. In fact, it isn’t even being placed under the “Games” section, but is rather listed as a Productivity app. Indeed, it doesn’t seem like much of a game at all: according to the App Store Listing, you can use BOY to become the hands of a clock, use BOY‘s body as a notepad and use the GPS unit to stretch BOY according to how far you’ve traveled in the real world?
Neat? Jeez, I don’t even know. Who would have thought that Takahashi could have taken the weirdest game he’s ever made and turned it into an even weirder iPhone productivity app? It’s only 2 bucks, though, so what the hell.
Hadouken! Although Street Fighter IV almost obliges its players to invest in a special arcade stick in order to be playable even on next-gen consoles, Capcom’s still going to try to bring its famous fighting game to the iPhone and iPod Touch… although the virtual joystick should be enough to arch the eyebrows of anyone who has pumped a quarter into a Street Fighter arcade machine.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k0V4Zk4Nqs
We told you a few weeks ago that Square|Enix was bringing classic titles from its long-running RPG series Final Fantasy to the iPhone. Today, we bring you the first footage of the game in action (and a screenshot showing the interface).
Looks tasty, though I admit I’ll be more excited when Final Fantasy IV comes to the iPhone. That’s a must-download. And don’t even get me started on Chrono Trigger…
Via TouchArcade
The iPhone already plays Doom better than just about any smartphone out there thanks to iD Mobile’s continuing interest in porting their older titles and releasing iPhone-specific spin-off games of their more popular franchises to the App Store… but years before the iPhone’s debut, I was playing Doom RPG on my little Motorola RAZR.
Doom RPG was a great little game that did the impossible: it translated the frenetic first-person action of Doom into a wonderful, story-rich, turn-based RPG perfect for playing on a cell phone’s numeric keypad.
Ever since I got my iPhone, I’ve wished that iD Mobile would port it on over to the App Store… and while they still haven’t done so, they’ve done one better, releasing a sequel for the iPhone and iPod Touch called Doom II RPG. It’s available on the App Store now for $4.
My only question: who is that egghead shooting the demon in the screenshot? That’s not the bloodied, Schwarzenegger-esque marine I remember from Doom days gone by.
When I was a kid, there were lots of gaming platforms, but several failed due to existing IP. A prime example is the Commodore 128. Commodore touted the computer’s C64 compatibility as a major plus, but it meant no-one created C128 games, because loads of C64 ones already existed. The same, to some extent, went for the Amstrad CPC, which got loads of duff ports from the ZX Spectrum, due to some shared architecture. I wonder how iPad will fare. Apple’s device not only resembles a giant iPod touch—it also runs almost all existing App Store content. You get apps sitting centrally in the screen or ‘pixel doubled’.
With nearly 30 million iPhones and millions of iPod touches in the wild, and many thousands of games available, I wonder how many devs will target iPad, and how many will just continue developing for Apple’s already popular handhelds. If the former happens—and developers take a punt, hoping Apple’s new device will become as successful as iPhone and iPod touch—you end up with another top-quality gaming platform from out of nowhere. If not—which could so easily be the case—iPad will be a pretty device playing games that look OK, but were ultimately designed for another system. Here’s hoping the former’s the case.
This article originally appeared on Revert to Saved.
Way back when the iPhone was the much-speculated upon Apple product of the future, I took the liberty to imagine a time when the iPhone would be a legitimate mobile gaming competitor, tackling Nintendo and Sony head-on. It was a fun bit of predictification back then, but it’s science fact today. The clearest evidence yet that Nintendo’s dominance of portable gaming might be threatened is Rockstar Games’ much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, an epic, multi-hour crime game that is deeper than anything I’ve seen on the iPhone to date.
It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review MetaSquares, Piyo Blocks Lite, Space Dock, Sky Force, PuzzlingsXXX.
The venerable Grand Theft Auto series has been ported to almost every device in gadetry’s zoological garden, but few of the efforts were as superlative as Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS. Realizing that the first-person style of the likes of Grand Theft Auto III and IV would be ill-suited for the DS’ control scheme and modest hardware, they instead came up with an amalgam of the frenetic, top-down 2D action of Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2 combined with the story and strong characters of the latter games in the series.
The result is a masterpiece: not just one of the best games in the handheld line Grand Theft Auto games, but the series as a whole. And now it’s available over at the App Store for $9.99.
I haven’t tried the iPhone version yet, but the screenshots look remarkably more crisp and detailed than the Nintendo DS version, although it retains the latter’s attractive cel-shaded top-down perspective. A failing of the DS version was afterthought touch gimmicks, and I imagine those have been ported wholesale to the iPhone version, but overall, if Chinatown Wars for the iPhone is as good as game as its DS counterpart, this is a must buy for Apple gamers.
Since late 2008, John Kooistra has been masterminding an intergalactic war—inside your iPhone. The reds and blues have been engaged in a deadly struggle, as evidenced in twist-based shooter Blue Defense and its more involved sequel Blue Attack.
Red Conquest is John’s most advanced and innovative game yet, a complex, exciting RTS that takes full advantage of Apple’s hardware. Cult of Mac interviewed John about how he got into iPhone games development and how the latest game in the red/blue saga came to be.
Makers of quirky, charming and Mac game makers nonpareil Popcap Games are having a fantastic deal: buy a game (or, for that matter, twelve) from them and all the money will go to Haitian earthquake relief.
The deal’s good for today only, but there’s no shortage of great Popcap games to choose from, including Bejeweled 2, Bookworm, Peggle, Plants vs. Zombies and Zuma’s Revenge.
What a wonderful gesture on behalf of Popcap. Let’s hope they can translate the money from my purchase of Plants vs. Zombies into enough medical supplies to prevent some poor Haitian for becoming the latter.
Former Quicktime guru Steve Perlman has been flogging his latest startup, OnLive, for awhile now. He’s hawking a thin client for gaming, which requires a bit of explanation: think of gaming in the cloud. Instead of installing an MMORPG or FPS on your Mac, you instead logon to a central server with beefy hardware, which pumps out the game to you over the Internet.
In very loose theory, that means that you can play the hottest and most technically advanced games on even the lowest-specced computers or handheld devices: the server does all the rendering, and basically streams to the user a live video of the game being played according to his or her button and mouse clicks. In even looser theory, you could play even the most graphically demanding PC games on your iPhone.
Last week, Perlman demonstrated the OnLive technology to his alma mater, Columbia University. It’s an impressive demonstration, but there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of Perlman’s claims.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp29W61pwTA
Gunman seems like a keen little iPhone app. Think of it like suburban Lazer Tag, replete with a healthy dash of augmented reality, but missing the cute beeyooping space guns or the likelihood of being shot to death by a trigger happy cop.
In Gunman, two iPhone-toting players square off in a suburban deathmatch arena. First, each player identifies the shirt color of their opponent; then, using their iPhone’s built-in camera as both gun barrel and sights, they take aim and shoot at one another, shaking their iPhone to reload their virtual glocks. If the Gunman app detects that the opponent’s shirt color was in the iPhone’s crosshairs when the shot was fired, it will register a kill and vibrate the iPhone of the perforated victim.
It looks like a lot of fun, and for this holiday week only, it’s on sale over at the App Store for only $0.99. You can check out Gunman’s trailer above. Matrix techno ahoy!
[via 9to5Mac]
At this point, it’s not really surprising that the iPhone 3Gs’ graphics are capable of pumping out the polygons needed to bring a sophisticated 3D engine to the handset, but it’s still wonderful to watch Epic Games’ Mark Rein play Unreal Tournament deathmatch on his third generation iPod Touch. You can see a video of it in action after the jump.
You can take your business school degree and cram it up your plush Christmas stocking: iPhone games developer Tapulous, best known for their rhythm game Tap Tap Revenge, are now bringing in $1 million a month in sales.
In the laughable understatement of the year, Tapulous says they are profitable. Tap Tap Revenge has been installed on over one-third of all iPhones and iPod Touches. CEO Bart Decrem says that he experiences his company to exponentially grow as the mobile app market gets broader. “It’s going to be big and all of a sudden people are going to say, ‘holy cow, where did those guys come from?'”he said.
That’s great for Tapulous and its small constabulary of employees — it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys — but they are, of course, in the minority. I suspect Tapulous just has too much momentum to stop: they launched an iPhone game early inspired by a very popular and casual-friendly genre of music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, and they can ride that early success for awhile. Things are doubtlessly not so rosy for the developers trying to get their apps noticed in a sea of a hundred thousand now.
There’s probably nothing so dissimilar to an iPhone as a fresh, greasy donut covered in powdered sugar; and Homer would probably be the last person on Earth to ever have one (an iPhone, not a donut, dufus). So pairing Homer Simpson with an iPhone might just be crazy enough to be brilliant (this is Homer logic, it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense).
The Simpson’s Arcade features a hungry Homer in a quest for — you guessed it — donuts, with mini-games that include using “touch and accelerometer controls to ‘Slap Homer’ back to life,” says game publisher Electronic Arts.
EA says the the game — which it says is due out sometime this December — is voiced “by the real, live actors” from The Simpsons; with any luck this means the incontestably brilliant Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer will be channeling Chief Wiggum and Mr. Smithers from iPhones everywhere, soon.
The App Store remains a bone of contention for many developers, but IUGO knew its A.D.D. game would throw multiple spanners in the works. That said, it wasn’t expecting its minigame collection with a decidedly risque bent would languish in the approvals process for months. At the end of November, it finally emerged, having been stripped of many games, but still boasting 70 quickfire challenges for iPhone gamers.
I spoke to IUGO Director of Business Development Sarah Thomson to find out about how A.D.D. came to be, and about IUGO’s struggles to get the game approved for the App Store.
Despite the fact that the iPod Touch is increasingly being branded as a gamer’s device, Apple’s never had much truck with gaming… at least in-house. But new calls for a video game artist for the iPhone Gaming Group imply that Apple might be preparing to make a serious push into the gaming market, perhaps to better compete with other handhelds like the Nintendo DS.
Inspired (as legend goes) by a piece of pizza with a slice missing, Namco employee Tōru Iwatani first released the classic game Puck-Man to Japanese arcades almost thirty years ago. Later that year, Puck-Man came to the United States by Midway, although wisely renamed with the knowledge of just how tempting it would be to erase just a slight wedge of that first P‘s loop. The rest is history: America’s had Pac-Man fever ever since.
While the classic Pac-Man game has since been expanded into a franchise of quasi-sequels and spin-off titles, what you might not know is that original Pac-Man designer Tōru Iwatani never had any part designing the sequels until 2007, when he was invited by Namco and Microsoft to design a true sequel to his original game. The result was Pac-Man Championship Edition and it was the best Pac-Man games since Ms. Pac-Man. And now it’s available for the iPhone and iPod Touch for $3.99.
If you like to game on your Mac, you’ve probably played something released by Aspyr Media. After all, what choice did you have? Aspyr has long been one of the pillars of the wobbly Mac gaming scene, porting over seventy games to OS X, including The Sims, Call of Duty 4, Civilization 4 and Quake 4. Short of restarting into Boot Camp, Aspyr has been the only way for Apple gamers to actually play most of the AAA game releases on their machines.
Sad news for Mac gamers, then. According to gaming site Big Download, Aspyr Media has laid off over fifty percent of its staff, with only a handful of team members now remaining in the office. The layoffs apparently happened weeks ago, but the news has only just gotten out.
Aspyr Media’s business is more than just Mac porting of course: they also port games from consoles to the PC, and recently ported the original Call of Duty to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Unfortunately, it looks unlikely that their core Mac team members got away unscathed. The Mac gaming scene just got even sparser.
Panic Software are the makers of some of the finest Mac software out there, including the superb FTP application Transmit, the superlative Usenet program Unison, and the hyperbolically adjectived icon tool, Candybar.
When Panic isn’t applying their peculiar brand of genius to creating the best programs OS X has to offer, they are drafting up hilarious mock histories of their company’s misadventures in the burgeoning Atari 2600 market… replete with gorgeously hallucinogenic cover art for what their apps would have looked like at Atari cartridges back in 1983.
To date, Dragon’s Lair — that “classic” quarter sucker of inexplicable and catastrophic player death animated by Don Bluth and first released to arcades in 1983 — is available for over 59 different platforms. Now you can make it sixty: Dragon’s Lair has officially been released for the iPhone.