If your New Year’s resolution was to age in style, then you’re clearly thinking along the same lines as the makers of The Sims FreePlay for iOS.
In its first update of 2014, the freemium mobile version of the EA life sim now lets you “complete your family tree” by aging your teen Sims into adults by completing the “Adulthood” quest, while also letting you socialize with senior sims by completing the “Seniors” quest.
I’ll be honest: Missile Command was never my favorite classic game from the glory days of Atari. Originally released as a coin-op in 1980, designed by Dave Theurer (the man who also created Tempest and the world’s first commercial game to feature 3-D polygonal graphics, I, Robot), Missile Command came straight out of an era in which the scariest thing imaginable was a nuclear attack.
The game puts you in control of three anti-air missile batteries, as you defend cities from being destroyed by an endless hail of ballistic missiles. Like every game of its era, Missile Command didn’t have fancy graphics to carry it: it had to make do with limited processing power and graphical/audio capabilities by crafting a playing experience simple and fun enough to keep you pumping quarters into the arcade.
The team behind cult drawing app DrawQuest have sadly announced that it will be closing shop.
For those unfamiliar with it, DrawQuest is was an iOS app — originally for iPad, but with an iPhone version launched in November last year — that set daily drawing challenges to a niche community of artists.
In a blog post on the DrawQuest site, app creator Christopher “moot” Poole (also the man behind 4Chan) wrote the following:
With Nintendo recently admitting that its Wii U console has flopped — slashing its sales forecasts for the device by 70 percent, despite U.S. spending on games consoles reaching a three-year high — the rumor mill has been abuzz with reports that the Japanese games manufacturer would exit the hardware business altogether, and instead focus on creating games for existing smartphones and tablets.
Less than two weeks after its iOS launch, intelligent news app NewsBrain has received an update that allows it to read news articles aloud to you.
To activate NewsBrain’s text-to-speech capability, simply tap the “share” button or press and hold on an article, before selecting the “speak” option — letting you get caught up with your reading while, for instance, jogging or driving to work.
Joining the likes of iTunes Radio, Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio, Beats Music — the music subscription service spearheaded by Jimmy Iovine — launches today, 21 January.
Combining human curation from “the best music experts” to algorithm-based automated recommendations, Beats Music will offer access to over 20 million songs via unlimited, ad-free streaming for $9.99 a month on all the usual platforms — including iOS and Mac.
iOS 7.1 takes another slow step closer to launch with the release of beta 4 to developers. As ever, the release notes are scant, so it’ll take some digging to really find out what has changed. There’s on bit of good news though: the Messages app should no longer lie to you about messages failing.
Mega Jump 2 is a game about jumping. Forever.
For those unfamiliar with the original 2010 Mega Jump, think of it as a variation on a pinball game — with your mission to keep your character (in this case a squishy red monster named Redford, or one of his animal pals) airborne for as long as possible.
To do this you tilt your iOS device to control the direction of vertical leaps: trying to bounce on platforms and collect power-ups that will keep your avatar hurtling on an ever-upwards trajectory.
VLC, a popular third-party video player for iOS, today received a major update that introduces a swanky new design and lots of new features. The app now looks right at home on devices running iOS 7, and it has the ability to stream videos from Google Drive and Dropbox. You can even download videos from UPnP media multimedia servers on your local network.
Quantified Selfers in the Apple community have a new app to download, in the form of lifelogging app OptimizeMe, which recently launched in the App Store.
A single iOS app that tracks all of your daily activities, OptimizeMe allows users to log mood, stress level, health status, quality of sleep, weight, and a number of other variables. With the addition of activity tracker Moves installed, it also automatically tracks Running, Cycling, Walking, Steps, Calories and Location (Foursquare).
With season three having come to an end, fans of the BBC’s Sherlock series will be happy to hear that today marks the launch of a new game app — featuring new footage starring actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman.
BlackBerry and Windows Phone might be having a hard time trying to break up the monopoly on mobile software held by Android and iOS, but that hasn’t stopped the Chinese government from having a go with a platform of its own.
Built by a company called Shanghai Liantong in conjunction with ISCAS (Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences), COS — which stands for China Operating System — aims to take on Android and iOS by providing better localization for things like language input and cloud services.
DoubleTwist, the company that has long been helping Android-powered devices work harmoniously with iTunes, today released a new Android app that lets users rip songs from iTunes Radio. Called AirPlay Recorder, the app essentially turns your Android device into an AirPlay receiver, then records all the audio that you play through it.
But is it legal?
Are you ready to access your Mac Chromotely? No, doubtlessly not. None the less, you will soon have the option to do just that from your iOS device, if an online document from Google is to be believed.
Creepypasta meme Slender Man is back again — this time in an official sequel to 2012’s Slender Rising called, imaginatively enough, Slender Rising 2.
For those unfamiliar with the game, it pits you against the so-called Slender Man in four different horror movie-style locations, including the fan-favorite Mansion and Ghost Town. Your task is to rescue lost souls and pick up signs along the while, all while defending yourself with a shogun.
News Republic — the iOS app which describes itself as the “definitive news app” — has received an upgrade, including several significant improvements.
Version 4.0 boasts a fresh, iOS 7 optimized look featuring a new icon and added space in the layout for easier browsing and reading of the news.
Apple has been accused of censorship in the past when it has been a little heavy-handed (to say the least) about banning content in the App Store.
With that being said, few were upset to hear that Plastic Surgery for Barbie — a game which asks players of 9 years+ to perform liposuction on Barbie-styled characters to make them “slim and beautiful” — has been pulled from the App Store. Google has similarly pulled the app from its own Google Play store.
Another day, another new iOS game is launched toward the back of the App Store net!
Given a soft launch last week in the Australian App Store last week, Football Kicks: Title Race is now available to download internationally.
Thanks to the release of Chrome 32 for Android and iOS, users of Google’s mobile OS will have the option of reducing their browser’s data usage by up to 50 percent.
It may not be close to what it was in its heyday, but the news that The Simpsons is set to finally be available for legal streaming in the U.S via iOS devices is enough to have most people saying “Mmm… Apple” — followed by a gargling sound.
More than 30 years old as a concept, and one of the very first iOS games to be released in the App Store back in the day, Pac-Man is a genuine O.G. of the gaming world.
With Apple currently giving it away for a limited time as part of its “App of the Week” promotion, we at Cult of Mac thought the time was right to pay homage by revisiting one of the all-time-greats.
So how does it measure up here in 2014?
The iOS gaming experience is about to get a whole lot more interactive, thanks to Israeli startup Umoove.
With its new app Umoove Experience, downloadable free of charge from the App Store, gamers can have a go at piloting a 3D avatar flying over a village — enabling them to control navigation entirely by face and head gestures.
MakeDoc looks like a good bet for otherwise right-thinking folks who find them selves required to supply a Word DOCX file. Being a smart nerd, you undoubtedly write in Markdown, converting to the required format on output. But DOCX isn;t an output option for most iOS text editors. That’s where makeDoc comes in.
Originally arriving in the App Store last Thursday, Rhythm Thief & the Paris Caper mysteriously vanished the following day after SEGA discovered “unexpected problems” with the game.
Do you get annoyed at struggling to find symbols on iOS, or find yourself missing the Unicode library found on OS X?
If you’re the kind of person that needs to make frequent use of symbols and characters not found on QWERTY keyboards, you could a lot worse than checking out the new Simbol app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
