gaming - page 54

For those of you who remember the good old days of the Error Bomb and the SE-30, you may remember the old Broderbund game Shufflepuck Café. You were thrust into rough and tumble space bar, clearly the outsider, forced to prove yourself in a true game of wits and agility: computer air hockey. It was a simple game for simple times: a handful of wacky alien characters, mild nudity, and an animated screen crack when your opponent scored. Ah to go back for one more round.

But you’d need a vintage Mac for that, and you threw yours out with your velour leisure suit years ago. Fret not! There are a few free possibilities for a quick match on OS X! None line up perfectly with the original, and for that I am exploring the avenues of emulation, but in a pinch these will do.

TuxPuck is perhaps the most reminiscent of the original, with a character closely resembling Princess Bejin. It is, however, limited in the characters you can play against and might need a bit of massaging to get it to play.

Shufflepuck REVOLUTION provides a bit more variety in the way of characters, including Woz and Jobs as opponents, but it’s also updated the system with 3D graphics. Unlike TuxPuck, Shufflepuck REVOLUTION insists on playing in fullscreen, which is a bit off-putting if you don’t know that right away.

The quest for the perfect OS X Shufflepuck match continues!

Last week I asked Cult readers for their nominations for new Mac app of the year. Things, 1Password and Dropbox seemed to be the consensus choices, all of them excellent new software products.

It got me thinking, though: how has my computing behavior changed during the last 12 months? What new software am I using that I wasn’t using last Christmas, and why?

Griptonite Games, makers of the wildly overpriced iPhone trivia game Ben Stein: It’s Trivial ($4.99 at the AppStore), announced Wednesday an opportunity to receive an autographed “diploma” from the dour funnyman and crypto-pundit/economist for the first 100 players who successfully complete the game and steal Ben Stein’s mansion. Winners will be inducted into the “Hall of Stein” and be entered into a drawing for the chance to play the game live against Stein himself.

It’s Trivial features fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek gameplay and over 1200 ranked trivia questions. Alongside simian cohort Cheex the Monkey, players go up against a virtual Stein, disguised as the Master of Trivia, to win points and prizes from Ben Stein’s Estate.

Players who complete the game can submit screenshots online at www.bensteinitstrivial.com. Of the first 100 submissions, one player will be randomly chosen to compete against Stein in a live broadcast event.

Oh, joy.

Bring me the head of Nick Pavis! The CEO of San Francisco-based entertainment software company MunkyFun is ultimately responsible for the two hours I failed to notice ticking by this afternoon while engrossed in his visually stunning, sneakily addicting iPhone game, Ivory Tiles.

With its oddly calming Oriental soundtrack and the realistic sounding slide and click of ivory tiles on a wooden gameboard, Ivory Tiles draws you into the challenge of solving its spatial and geometric puzzles like nothing I have ever experienced. Making excellent use of iPhone’s accelerometer and impeccable 3D graphics engine, the game took me through levels of frustration, elation and ultimately relaxation that I hardly imagined possible from playing a game on a mobile device.

Must. Keep. From. Number. One. Son.

$1.99 from the AppStore; worth ten times that amount. Requires iPhone 2.1 software update.

They may not look as studiously Apple as the Earbud speakers in the next post, but I’ll wager the $20 difference in price these Altec Lansing expressionist CLASSIC speakers kick some serious audio jams on those stylin’ earbuds.

To begin with, Altec Lansing is one of the venerable names in audiophile engineering. The Milford, PA-based company has been producing superior quality speakers since 1938 and this offering in the PC audio category lives up to its 70 year reputation for good sound. Unique cylindrical cabinets house specially designed 3″ drivers powered by 15 watts of total continuous power to deliver a full spectrum of clear, warm sound found in other PC audio products costing twice as much.

Speakers should never require an engineering degree to get going and these small-footprint machines, with their own simple style that says “listen up,” are about as plug and play as any audio component you will find. Power and speaker volume controls are at your fingertips on the rear of the Right speaker, and if you’ve got a friend over with an iPod or other portable audio device, you can easily listen to their iTunes library by plugging into the Altec’s 3.5mm Aux-in jack. All the cords and connecting hardware are made from high-quality, heavy gauge material that inspires confidence in a well-made, long-lasting product.

I mentioned they sound great, right? For $79.95, these speakers will upgrade your standard thin, tinny PC audio system and bring new life to your music, gameplay and movie watching experience.

Available now from the Altec Lansing website and select Apple Retail outlets, these and the full line of Altec Lansing PC audio components will also be featured at Macworld 2009.

I like the look of word game Giant Crayon WordSoup – it reminds me of Wurdle on the iPhone, which keeps me occupied for hours, when I can wrench it from my wife’s fingers (she gets addicted and spends the whole evening playing if I’m not careful).

But, um, guys? That moment at 0:54? How can I put this?

We reported last week on developer/blogger Erica Sadun’s discovery of an undocumented feature in Apple’s iPhone SDK that allows video out from an iPhone to be displayed on a TV monitor. Friday she revealed what is sure to become a popular exploit of this feature.

Sadun contacted developers at Freeverse, producers of the popular mobile game Moto Chaser and convinced them to create a TV version of their game. In a few hours, Freeverse code monkeys were able to come up with the demo version of Moto Chaser featured in the video above, which seems to herald happy days ahead for fans of iPhone gaming.

The detailed technical ins and outs of how Freeverse managed to pull off its feat are available in Sadun’s post at Ars Technica, but it’s worth noting that the TV version of the game played best on the second-generation iPod touch. The newer touch is built on a 532MHz CPU versus the original iPhone’s 412MHz. This extra speed helps up the frame rate produced by the device, the key component for any first person interactive video game.

Via Ars Technica

Think you’ve got the hands or, in the case of iPhone, the fingers of a surgeon? You’ll soon be able to find out with a new mobile game from developer ngmoco, inc.. Dr. Awesome, Microsurgeon MD is an iPhone game that lets you import friends from your address book and “perform surgery” on them in a Qix meets Trauma Center gamescape environment, according to blogger Brandon Boyer at Boing Boing.

Check out the trailer above and get scrubbed.

Paramount Digital Entertainment has revived the School of Rock brand with an application that teaches you principles of music education on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

The 2003 movie starring Jack Black tells the story of a struggling musician who scams a job teaching at an upper-crust private high school and ends up teaching the kids how to form a band and play rock music. The app gives users the opportunity to experiment with a variety of authentic virtual instruments ranging from guitar and bass to piano and drums. Users can also learn to play tracks from legendary artists including Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Scorpions and Royal.

The $6.99 app is organized as a game that incorporates features allowing players to explore the history and diversity of music and instruments through a series of quizzes and challenges. Players are challenged to identify brand-name guitars and keyboards using “axes” from well known musicians, receive instruction in the areas of melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo and beats, and have the ability to record and play back jam sessions.

As the game progresses, the songs and variations become more challenging, allowing players to master instruments, advance to different levels and accumulate points that eventually result in graduation from The School of Rock. Groupies and backup singers not included.

For a while Spore seemed to have gone the route of Duke Nukem’ A game often hyped, frequently shown, and never delivered, but Sunday September 7th I finally got my copy of the God of God Simulators. Follow me after the jump to see if it was worth the 3-year wait.

UPDATE: One year on, and my view of the platform for gaming has changed somewhat—read Why Apple is Right to Pitch iPod touch as a Games Console to Beat the DSi and PSP Go.

The iPod touch segment of Let’s Rock was particularly notable for Apple’s attempts to position the device as a major gaming platform. “It’s the best portable device for playing games,” claimed Jobs. Apple’s website now calls iPod touch the ‘funnest iPod ever’, and talks about its ‘hundreds of games’. This emphasis on gaming, along with the demonstrations we’ve seen from various developers, appears to be positioning iPod touch alongside Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s DS, rather than talking about mobile gaming as though iPod touch has any relationship whatsoever to a certain smartphone and cell-phone gaming in general.

There are arguments in favor of this belief. Games have proved phenomenally popular on the App Store. They’re also cheap, relatively plentiful, and simple to get on to your iPhone or iPod touch. Also, crucially, Apple’s solution betters Sony’s and Nintendo’s by allowing updates to games—something owners of the abhorrent DS port of The Settlers no doubt wish were true of their platform.

The problem is, iPod touch is only ever going to be a niche concern in the gaming space. Find out why after the break…

Images: Touch Arcade

Update: Belkin has now confirmed that this story is a hoax.

This past weekend saw the rumor mill go into overdrive regarding iPhone games controllers. While the chaps at iControlPad valiantly soldier on with their home-grown iPhone games controller that relies on jailbroken iPhones, Touch Arcade provided images of a rival (shown above)—supposedly from Belkin—that will have official App Store support.

The two-piece device would slide on to your iPhone, providing a joystick and six face buttons, akin to the configuration on the Nintendo DS. This means games developers wouldn’t have to rely on the iPhone touch-screen and tilting mechanism, instead being able to offer more standard control methods for iPhone games.

Predictably, some screamed “fake” once these images appeared, and others merely screamed, barely coherently ranting something about how AWFUL it would be to have a controller like this, because it’s the iPhone’s bizarre-o-controls that make it what it is regarding games.

Yeah, yeah, whatever. I love innovation, and I love people doing different stuff with iPhone gaming. However, I’m old, and I’d rather like to have a copy of Pac-Man on my iPhone that can actually be controlled via a non-stupid (sorry, non-innovative) method, as I hinted at a couple of months back. (Mind you, I’m probably not going to be totally happy until someone finds a way to run C64 games on iPhone and also plug in a Competition Pro…)