Blending gorgeous black and white comic book-style visuals with compelling gameplay, iOS racer SXPD has just received a 2.0 update, not only bringing the game to iPhone for the first time, but also lowering its price from $1.99 to free.

Listen up, soldier! The aliens are headed our way and it’s up to you to keep them out of our base. You’ll have access to a variety of offensive towers that you can upgrade along the way, as well as a special Hero and other power ups to turn the tide of battle in our favor.

If you’re like many of us, you love a good tower defense game on the go. There are a few good ones out there (Fieldrunners, Kingdom Rush), but we’re always willing to give a new take on this classic gaming genre a spin.

The true test of a tower defense game, however, is whether it keeps you in that zen-like flow state while you play, and whether or not you want to keep playing it.

Amazon is the latest company to move into the ultra-hot area of mobile payments with a new hardware/software combination called Amazon Local Register.

It’s essentially a credit card reader that attaches to your tablet or smartphone, and is accompanied by an app, allowing small business to take credit card payments.

The idea that the forthcoming iPhone 6 (expected to be unveiled September 9) is the most anticipated refresh of Apple’s smartphone in ages was given further credibility by a recent survey by financial firm R.W. Baird.

Quizzing 1,000 residents surveyed in July, 6.8 percent of respondees said that they planned to buy the iPhone 6 without ever having laid eyes on it. This number is up from the 4.4 percent who answered that same way back in February.

The firm also notes that this intent to purchase is higher than the number of people who said they would buy the iPhone 5s after it had already been announced.

It’s hard to know what to make of an app update that promises to “cut crash rates in half.” If you’re a glass-half-full kind of guy, you’re happy with the increased stability. If you’re a glass-half-empty guy, though, you wonder why the hell they can’t get around to fixing the other 50 percent of unexpected software crashes.

I’m sort of a glass-half-empty kind of guy, at least when it comes to Facebook. So when they announce that their latest update to the Facebook for iPhone and iPad app has “solved a long-term mobile debugging problem and reduced the crash rate for people using the Facebook for iOS app by more than 50%,” I wonder why the hell a multibillion dollar corporation can’t fix the other half.

We may be in something of a golden age for iOS gamers, but Candy Crush maker King isn’t reaping the benefits quite as much as it had hoped.

With revenue shrinking, and having been unable to recapture the lightning in a bottle of its breakout hit Candy Crush Saga, the company dropped 21 percent in value yesterday after posting disappointing earnings. The company’s earnings fell 5 percent (or $30 million) from the first quarter this year.

A new report coming of China suggests that the eagerly-anticipated iPhone 6 is currently in the PVT (Product Validation Test) stage of production. During this stage, the assembly line runs at full speed to produce a small number of finished units for quality assurance purposes. If any issues are highlighted at this stage, the production line can be adjusted to ensure that all faults are ironed out by the time mass production begins.

If there are no faults highlighted, Foxconn can begin work producing the “unprecedented” numbers of iPhone 6 units for Apple, ready for its expected September 9 unveiling.

Hey guys, guess what? Twitter’s about to get a hell of a lot more annoying. Video ads in your stream are entering beta!

Apple has a long history of keeping BitTorrent apps out of the App Store. If you search for “BitTorrent” in the App Store now, only two results show up. Neither of them allow you to actually download torrents.

That’s why it was surprising when an app called Blue Downloader showed up in the store a couple of days ago. Its secret sauce is that it allows users to find and download torrents through sources chosen by its developer, Tyler Harrison, making it hard to use for illegal downloads like grabbing Expendables 3 off The Pirate Bay.

Apple approved Blue Downloader, but after Harrison made a change that allowed searching Google for torrents, the app was suddenly pulled. In an interview with Cult of Mac, Harrison explains how Apple’s response reflects its “innate fear of BitTorent” and his plans to get his app back in the store.

The tragic news of Robin Williams’ sudden death has sent most of us on a YouTube binge, watching TV shows, movies, and stand-up comedy bits from the funniest man who ever lived, and now Apple is paying its respects to the late-comedian with a new iTunes section dedicated to the world’s favorite cross-dressing funny man.

Beautiful piano music, a young protagonist, gorgeous visuals and landscapes fill the new trailer for upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive, Rime, from TequilaWorks and Sony Computer Entertainment.

The young boy, reminiscent of other young wandering protagonists like Link (Legend of Zelda), Wander (Shadow of the Colossus), and Oliver (Ni No Kuni), finds a keyhole in a distant tower, and races across the landscape to get there.

Why is he running? What will he find when he finally attains the tower? Is this even the right tower? The just-posted trailer (linked below) has no answers, but makes us want to find out.

Oculus Rift headsets might become the next big thing of the future, so to make it easier for Mac developers to actually get their apps onto Rift, Oculus is finally making it possible to compile Rift-compatible apps on a Mac.

We’ve known for awhile that the next version of USB will copy Apple’s Lightning connector with a reversible design. Now the next-gen connector is ready for production, which means you’ll start seeing it in new desktops, laptops, tablets, phones and accessories.

Today the USB 3.0 Promoter Group announced that work on the new design, called USB Type-C, is done and ready to be implemented.

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to treat yourself to a new Apple TV, the folks at Cupertino are making sweeting the deal for the next six weeks by including a free $25 gift card with all Apple TV purchases.

Apple may have just forged a partnership with its old nemesis to penetrate deeper into enterprise, but according to one report, iOS is still king among U.S. corporations and accounts for over two thirds of total activations, while Microsoft’s productivity beast barely even register.

Apple’s iPhone 5s screen repair service is now available at Genius Bars in the U.K. and throughout Europe, just one week after it kicked off in the U.S. The process costs £119/€150, and it is carried out within one hour.

Mac are incredibly complex machines, but thanks to Jony Ive and the rest of the creators, they’re also incredibly simple to use. Mose Mac users know to use keyboard shortcuts to make daily tasks even quicker, but not many know how to turn your Mac’s trackpad into one of the best time-saving tools you’ll ever use.

In today’s video, we’ll take a look at a little known feature called Hot Corners. We’ll teach you how to set them up and how to use them. How to Put your display to sleep, clear your desktop and do even more useful actions, now with just a few quick flicks.

Subscribe to Cult of Mac TV on YouTube to catch all our latest videos.

Apple has released its first ever report on the diversity of its workforce today, revealing what we’ve all known for year: it’s mostly a bunch of white dudes.

Diversity is still a work in progress at Apple, but the company says its report does show some progress as currently 70% of its global workforce are men.

Every day, Cult of Mac Deals brings you a wide array of outstanding deals on things that we think will make your life easier and more interesting. As new deals emerge, though, old ones have to close.

Today, we highlight a selection of three deals that are ending very soon: Three Years of Hacker Monthly, The 0-100 WordPress Starter Kit, and the Name Your Own Price Designer Bundle 3.0. Get these before they’re gone for good!

In some ways Siri today is a little bit like the Macintosh circa 1984: everyone realizes the potential, but the technology is not yet as good as it could be.

With that in mind, several of the creators of Siri have set up a new startup outside of Apple called Viv Labs, aimed at creating a next gen virtual assistant capable of understanding sentences far more complex than the kind that you would normally feed to Siri.

Back when the Apple IIgs was released in 1986, the Internet as we know it didn’t really exist. Instead, we had electronic bulletin boards, or BBSes: simple ASCII portals for email, games, file downloads, chatting, and — yes — even porn, that we all dialed into over phone lines.

Weren’t around to experience this for yourself? Don’t worry about it. You can now experience all the analog splendor of an old-school BBS for yourself, thanks to Level 29. And even better, it all runs in a web browser.

We’re all so used to using our iPhones as our primary cameras these days that it’s difficult to remember what it was like in the dark days before the device came along.

Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a new series of Apple-related patents, including an historic 2008 filing for an Apple camera. While the patent covers both a standalone camera (something Apple hasn’t done since the QuickTake camera launched in 1994) and a camera integrated into a PDA, it is likely that this is the patent which covers the original iPhone.

Introduced in iOS 7, Activation Lock is a feature that prevents users who recover a lost or stolen iPhone from activating the device without signing in with the Apple ID used to erase the device remotely.

By all accounts, Activation Lock has made a difference in stopping smartphone theft, especially in New York. But in California, law may very well mandate smartphone features like Activation Lock shortly.

How valuable is it to have an Apple Store in your property portfolio? Pretty valuable indeed, as it (unsurprisingly) turns out.

That’s the point proven by the Third Street Promenade Apple Store in Southern California, which has just sold to new real estate buyers for a record-breaking $100 million: making it the per-square-foot record holder for commercial real estate in the entire West Los Angeles area.