games - page 48

I grew up in the 80s, so I know how close we came to total nuclear annihilation when the WOPR computer became self-aware, as we saw in the 1983 documentary WarGames. The only thing that saved us back then was Tic Tac Toe, a game that became the savior of all humanity just by being stupid and largely unwinnable.

Tic Tactics aims to solve its predecessor’s “what the hell, we’re bored” factor by adding eight more boards and some much-needed lateral thinking.

And it succeeds admirably.

It’s a day for giving thanks, here in the US, and a ton of iOS developers have decided to thank us all by putting their fantastic games on sale for the iOS platform. We’ve slogged through the sales out there for this weekend and put together a list of the best deals and sales on games we could find.

We’ll keep updating this post as we get more great gaming deals to send your way.

As Black Friday and Cyber Monday come creeping up on us, so do some of the best app deals, as developers slash prices on their software to get us all geared up for the holidays. One of the first great deals of the season is now here: if you love turn-based-strategy and want to help the Earth repel a wave of alien invaders, XCOM: Enemy Unknown has dropped to just $9.99.

Rockstar Games announced this morning that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will be making its way to iOS device next month after originally being released for the PS2 back in 2004.

Not only is Rockstar porting the game to iOS, but the company says it’s also adding support for Made for iOS controllers on iOS 7, along with the addition of brand new touch controls and contextual control options that only display as you need them.

Few companies are better at keeping their games updated than Rovio, who’ve released more updates for its Angry Birds games than one can count. Add another grain of sand to the beaches of infinity, then, because the bird-vs.-pig physics strategy game has just gotten a new update, adding 30 levels to the core game as well as giving the bomb bird a new electric power.

In 1983, Electronic Arts released M.U.L.E., a seminal title in the history of gaming that not only was one of the first real-time strategy titles, but also one of the first multiplayer games. It’s a game that has been widely hailed for decades by gaming enthusiasts, but has never seen an official update… until now, as M.U.L.E. Returns has hit the iOS App Store.

I only really have a Facebook account for work purposes, and I usually only go there when I want to feel bad about myself. So I typically have no idea what’s going on there.

Apparently, Alpha Zen, a quotation-focused new game by developer Large Animal Games, wants me to know what’s going on with my friends, so it includes a mode that makes their statuses into game pieces.

It’s a little weird, but let me explain how the game works.

This week’s editors choice app in the iOS App Store features the release of Clumsy Ninja, which is notable because for one, it took these guys a really long ass time to get their game into the App Store, and two, Apple’s promoting the app with a special new video trailer in the App Store.

Clumsy Ninja is the first app to get a video trailer in the App Store – a feature long requested by third party developers. Right now it looks like the trailer is only viewable on an iOS device, as the app’s page in iTunes only shows a couple of image previews. 

Crescent Moon Games, the studio behind quite a few amazing mobile iOS games (Siegecraft, Pocket RPG, Paper Monsters), has just released its latest: Space Chicks.

Ignoring the obvious “damsel in distress” trope, this game plays like a spectacular mashup of games like Little Galaxy, Tiny Wings, and Jetpack Joyride, with gravity-affected planet hopping, coin collecting, and space-girl saving that will keep you playing long into the evening.

There’s something here for every one, and it’s all of $0.99.

The Shivah starts with a joke:

“A goy came up to Rabbi Moishe to ask, ‘Why do rabbis always answer with a question?’

To which Rabbi Moise replied, ‘Why not?'”

First released in 2006, The Shivah is a noirish, murder-mystery adventure game centered around a money-deficient New York synagogue. Its hero, Russell Stone, is not a hardbitten private investigator or a disgraced former police officer like the genre typically demands. He’s a cynical rabbi with a heavy conscience who stumbles into the investigation completely by accident. It sounds odd, and it is, but it also totally works.

Now, developer Wadjet Eye Games has released The Shivah: Kosher Edition, an updated iOS and PC version of the original game with all-new graphics and music. If you’ve never played the original and you’re a fan of adventure games and (well-meaning) Jewish humor, it’s a great take on the well-trod genre.

I mentioned high-concept games with evocative titles earlier this week when I reviewed Tilt to Live 2, and here’s another one.

Don’t Shoot Yourself! is a quick, often frustrating little game in which the name says it all. You control a little ship (I guess) trapped inside of a series of shapes. Your main goal is to keep moving for until a number on the right side of the screen counts down to zero, and all the while your little guy is firing bullets all hither and thither. Your secondary goal is not to fly into any of those bullets.

If it sounds daunting, that’s because it is. But it’s still a game worth trying if only to see if you’re up to the challenge.

The best puzzle games either have a single rule (Tetris: “Make lines.”) or a few basic rules based on things we know innately or intuitively (Where’s My Water?: “Dig holes, water goes down, steam goes up, poison is bad.”).

Flux Free is a new iOS title which falls into the latter category. It’s a shape-matching game built on a few basic concepts like color theory that keep it from becoming obtuse even when all of its mechanics are in play.

That’s not to say that it’s incredibly easy, but you’ll never spend any time trying to remember how anything works. And it’s smart and fun, so that’s good, too.

Tilt to Live is one of those high-concept games with a name that says it all. Kind of like Press X to Jason, but not quite as flippant or mocking.

And it was popular, so a sequel was inevitable. And so we have Tilt to Live 2: Redonkulous, which came out last week for iOS devices and delivers on its name almost immediately.

It’s kind of hard to explain until you’ve played it, though, and you should definitely play it.

There’s a reason that Apple usually invites Epic Games on stage. The developers’ mobile-only series, Infinity Blade and its sequels, shows off the gaming potential of any new iOS device by pushing its graphical potential to the very limits.

Infinity Blade games look beautiful no matter what device you run them on, but there’s a big difference graphically between playing Infinity Blade III on an iPad 2 and an iPad Air. If you happen to have a jailbroken device, though, a new jailbreak tweak will trick Infinity Blade into running at a higher graphical setting… apparently with little degradation of performance.

We all need a break every once in a while. And nothing can take some of the edge off than a good video game – especially a shooter.

Cult of Mac Deals has assembled a bundle of games that will keep your trigger finger going for hours with The iShooter Gamer Bundle. And it’s at a price that’s tough to beat – just $4.99 – a savings of 81%!

Nothing can touch the Fallout series of role-playing games for post-apocalyptic immersion; the ’50s, atomic-era nostalgia and post-nuclear holocaust loneliness and horror that the games simulate have gained the series a huge and devoted following. But none of it would have been possible without a breakout 1988 computer RPG called Wasteland.

Its title may sound like a Star Wars-based mockbuster by The Asylum (the studio that brought us Sharknado and Atlantic Rim), but Stellar Wars, a new iOS title out now from developer Liv Games, is actually the followup to 2011’s megapopular Legendary Wars. Only this one takes place in space and stars a bunch of cute robots.

So it’s off to a promising start from that alone.

Once you get over the cute overload from those little guys, though, Stellar Wars reveals itself to be a complex, surprisingly deep melange of a bunch of different game styles that shouldn’t work together, but then they totally do.

Just expect to have to work for it.

I’m a big fan of Iron Man. I’ll play virtually any game with Iron Man in it, on it, or around it, so naturally I took a swing at Gameloft’s Iron Man 3 tie-in game earlier this year. And it was a bland infinite runner to sit alongside all the other bland infinite runners released for popular film franchises. I wept.

So when I saw that Thor: The Dark World was not an infinite runner, I decided to give it a go. To my surprise, Thor: The Dark World is a top-down dungeon crawler hybrid that allows you to summon Einherjar, or heroes, to help fight alongside you. So you’ll charge through levels tapping every shiny thing and enemy in your path and can strategically call more fighters to the battle to deal with bosses and ranged attacks.

First-person shooters are tough to pull off in mobile. You have to manage two virtual joysticks if you want the flexibility of their console and PC cousins, and you also have to figure out how to make shooting work on a platform with no buttons. And thirdly, you have to compensate for the fact that the player’s thumbs must, by necessity, cover up part of the screen.

Neon Shadow is a new first-person shooter for iOS devices from developer Tasty Poison Games that aims to capture the bare-bones, “You are trapped in a cramped space with things that will kill you unless you kill them first” experience of classic FPSes, and it succeeds. It even does a callback to the original Doom games by having a picture of your character’s face that gets more bloodied and beat-up as you take damage.

Plus, you start with the shotgun, and the game gets an extra star just for that.

Those frustrated that Nintendo still stubbornly refuses to release an official Legend of Zelda game for iOS should pluck-up, because the next best thing is here. Heavily inspired by one of the best Zelda games, The Wind Waker, a console-quality Zelda like has just hit the Apple Store called Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas. And this is a game you want to get.

I’ve always loved the Lego suite of licensed games more than most people do. They’ve always been the perfect storm for me: a unique combination of geekiness, humor, and obsessive collection and completion. Every time I pick one up, I don’t stop playing it until I’ve unlocked every character, found every collectible, and beat every secret level.

Needless to say, I am a fan.

The iOS version of developer Traveler’s Tales sweded version of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy is out now; the epic 1.3-gig game contains Lego recaps of all three Lord of the Rings films, over 90 characters, and all the soon-to-be-dead orcs, goblins, and Uruk-Hai you can tap. And while the game is every bit as cute and collectastic as the other ones I’ve played, its easily confused controls bog it down a little.

That’s not to say that it’s unplayable, but you’ll have to muster all of your fandom and patience to really enjoy it.

Blocky Roads is kind of a weird game. It has block-based voxel graphics like Minecraft or the lesser-known Zelda clone 3D Dot Game Heroes, but rather than being an open-world construction title or a sword-and-shield adventure, it’s a game about driving cars in a 2.5D environment and picking up coins and treasure chests.

And once you’ve picked up enough coins, you can upgrade your cars to get better at driving around the 2.5D environment and picking up coins and treasure chests. Or you can use those same coins to unlock a new level full of even more coins and treasure chests. And so on.

And all of this is to save your character’s farm.

No, really. It’s a weird game.

In celebration of the Call Of Duty Ghosts launch, Cult of Mac Deals is bringing you the game that started it all…Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Fighting as both a U.S Marine and British S.A.S. soldier, you will utilize sophisticated technology to take control of the battlefield and to lead your squad to victory. And while it’d be great to be able to play the newest version of Call of Duty on your Mac, it’s not available yet. So get Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for only $4.99 through this exclusive Cult of Mac Deals offer.

I don’t need a game to constantly encourage me and tell me how well I’m doing or how good I am at playing it. I don’t need a game to take me by the hand and lead me along through its twists and turns. And I definitely don’t need a game to take pity on me if I’m not good at it right away.

And that’s a good thing because Octagon, a new twitchy arcade title by (mean) developer Lukas Korba, isn’t interested in doing any of that. Octagon wants to hurt you. It wants you to feel terrible and incompetent, and I have reason to believe that it’s actively trying to get me to break my phone.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s still fun. But holy crap, is it difficult.

Forget 3-D printing. The future of personal manufacturing is now 2-D printing – when you’re making iPhone keyboards that it. Using nothing but a keyboard printed onto a sheet of regular paper, along with Gyorgyi Kerekes’s new Paper Keyboard app, you can type and play games as if you’d dropped cash money on a real 3-D metal and plastic keyboard.