gaming - page 12

Chances are you’ve heard of Tamagotchi, the little handheld virtual pets that took over the world during the first decade of the 2000s, selling more than 76 million little egg-shaped devices as of 2010.

Hatch is one of the many virtual pet apps out there, but it’s an adorable one. You may even recognize the little Fugu creature from its own Facebook Messenger sticker series.

Virtual pets aren’t anything new to the iOS ecosystem, but this new collaboration between Hatch and super-popular video game Pocket God is something new. If you’ve ever thought about doing more with that little digital pal in your pocket, now might be the time. Check out the launch video below for more.

Halfbrick Studios, the folks behind massively popular endless-runner Jetpack Joyride have decided that the best way to get you to play their games is to give them away for a grand total of nothing.

The Brisbane-based game development studio was founded in 2001, and has gone on to make a ton of popular games across iOS and other platforms, including fruit-slashing hit Fruit Ninja and tongue-in-cheek giant robot game Colossatron.

There’s also Fruit Ninja Puss in Boots, the endless-runner Monster Dash, the song-creation game Band Stars, dual-stick shooter favorite Age of Zombies, and the wacky Fish Out of Water, where you get to flick various marine creatures across the top of the ocean for distance and style-based high scores.

All of these games will work on your iPhone or iPad, and — since you’re buying them at the free price now — you will own them into perpetuity.

You can grab any one of Halfbrick’s premium games for nothing right now, so head on over.

Source: iTunes

Your smartphone is an increasingly important battlefield in the ongoing war of the gaming consoles. Companion iOS apps for Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One aim to enhance the way you interact with your gaming system. These apps let you access your gaming achievements on the go, communicate with friends and even use your iOS device as a remote for your console.

In today’s video, we’ll give you a look at how the PlayStation and Xbox One SmartGlass apps compare.

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A simple glance at the stunning games perched atop the App Store game lists reveals we are experiencing a golden age for mobile gaming.

From the surreal, mind-bending Monument Valley to the Pixar movie brought to life that is Leo’s Fortune, 2014 has seen some of the most startlingly original gaming experiences in years arrive on iOS.

“I do feel like we are in a boom period,” says John Comes, design director at Uber Entertainment, the company behind games like the newly released Toy Rush.

Although Apple has been a hub of gaming going back to the glory days of the Apple II, today’s crop of hot titles are reshaping the landscape like never before. The present explosion of innovative iOS games results from several fortuitous factors coming together. Here’s why there’s never been a better time to be a gamer.

If you haven’t gotten enough of disgruntled avians from Rovio’s hit series Angry Birds, what with last week’s Angry Birds Epic or the well-received Angry Birds Star Wars mobile games, then this news is for you.

Rovio has teamed up with Hasbro to mashup its own quirky mobile gaming franchise with yet another pop-culture phenomenon, the Transformers. And not the Michael Bay hyper-CGI movies, either. This looks to be a full-on 1980s cartoon take on the “robots in disguise” theme, complete with birds disguised as robots that can turn into cars and airplanes.

Sigh.

LOS ANGELES — Drop this tactical-style vest onto your shoulders and fasten it high on your chest, and you’re suddenly feeling the action. Using audio-based haptic technology (the kind of rumbling vibrations that you’ll find in any video gaming controller), the KOR-FX turns the audio in the game into rumbles you can feel.

The makers of this new gaming peripheral have a few prototypes set up on the show floor at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week, and they’ll let all comers come and try a demo.

“Some people want to wear this thing lower on their chest, but up high is what stimulates the limbic system,” Seth Fandetti, CEO of Immerz (the makers of the KOR-FX) told us onsite at the expo. “It’s more than just feeling bullets hit you; it’s a whole immersive experience.”

Instead of trotting out the cliché question, “Are games art?,” an exhibit at the Electronic Entertainment Expo aims to explore the actual artwork from upcoming and recently announced video games.

Long gone are the pixellated abstracts of yesteryear: these are fully realized, gorgeous works of art in various styles, hung for all to see in the Los Angeles Convention Center, where the Expo takes place this week.

Developing today’s graphics-rich video games –mobile, console, or PC — takes a lot of time, talent, and passion, and the images above show the kind of artistic energy that is put into them. From the painterly styles of artwork from Assassin’s Creed Unity and Destiny to the poster illustration of The Banner Saga and Sunset Overdrive, there’s a lot to like in the images above.

All photos by Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

LOS ANGELES — Microsoft has faced a perception problem ever since last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. At this year’s E3 media briefing, however, everything the company said, did or showed was aimed squarely at fixing things.

“We listened to you, the gamers,” said Xbox director Phil Spencer to the crowd gathered here Monday. “This year, we’re only focusing on games.”

The next 90 minutes brought a fast-paced, booming litany of games, games, games. The wristbands given to every attendee at the Galen Auditorium flashed with colored lights to complement the onscreen demos and video game trailers. The speakers filled the room with so much sound that the hairs on the sides of my head moved when the explosions happened. And there were a lot of explosions.

When my kids and I walked into a coffee shop one sunny day last month, we were greeted by a row of tables holding laptops with gaming demos.

My son gravitated toward the biggest display, a huge TV screen with a giant, face-obscuring set of goggles set in front of it. This was the Oculus Rift, the latest fad gaming device that places two stereoscopic images in front of your eyes to simulate virtual reality.

He slid the massive black eyewear onto his face, picked up the connected Xbox controller, and started moving his head around. The rest of us could see the game on the TV — an abstract shooting gallery in three dimensions, with my boy at the center, first-person style.

After about five minutes of waving his head around and pressing buttons on the controller, my son pushed the goggles up and off his head and said, “Dad, I think I’m going to be sick.”

The sad part of buying a new console is not having enough games to play on it. That’s been the case with all three new next generation gaming machines released recently, but the trend is perhaps most noticeable with Sony’s new box, the PlayStation 4.

I purchased Sony’s hot new console on the day it came out, but the number of big new games I can run on it can easily be counted on one hand.

Sony looks to fill this gap next week at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, and it’s just released a staggeringly huge list of games (much bigger than the usual console-style announcement we’ve seen in years past) that we can look forward to seeing at their booth on the show floor, including over 40 games for the PlayStation 4 console itself.

You could run to the sun and back 160 times with the total meters run in Imangi Studio’s award-winning iOS games, Temple Run and Temple Run 2. Or you could fill 300 Olympic swimming pools with the number of gold coins collected in game (147 trillion of them, to be exact).

One billion downloads worldwide can bring a lot of success, like winning a BAFTA and Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice award in 2012. And, if you’re the company behind two of the biggest indie-hits of the last couple of years, you’re going to want to shout it from the rooftops.

“Having Temple Run reach the one billion downloads mark is a milestone we couldn’t have imagined when we first started out,” said Imangi co-founder Keith Shepherd in a press release. “We’re incredibly grateful to all the Temple Run players and our wonderful team.”

Maybe you’ve just seen the latest X-Men film. A lot of people have, so odds are pretty good. And if it left you wanting to know more about the original Days of Future Past storyline, but tracking down the trade paperback and then, like, reading it sounds like a lot of work, here’s a game you’ll want to check out.

Uncanny X-Men: Days of Future Past is out now for your favorite iOS device, and it aims to faithfully re-create the source material the way it originally appeared. This means that it’s the assassination of Senator Kelley that brings forth the robopocalypse (that character died in the first film, so he wasn’t available to die in the new one), and it’s Kitty Pryde, not Wolverine, who goes back in time to set things right.

Sure, you can play the whole game as Wolverine if you want, but if you’re a purist, you have a chance to do it “right.”

As a professional game developer, the big news coming out of Apple’s WWDC keynote wasn’t Swift or iCloud Drive — it was Metal.

In an onstage demo, Epic showed off the power of its Unreal engine after it had been modified to make use of this new Apple framework. Hundreds of fish reacted dynamically to a finger drawn on the screen. Leaves were shaken from a tree, and butterflies flew through the screen.

It was a very pretty demo. But what does it mean for the games you’ll be playing on your iOS device?

In all the recent Batman games (Arkham City, Arkham Asylum, Arkham Origins), I’ve always thrilled to Bat-grapple my way to the rooftops, occasionally base-jumping down to glide-kick some nasty thug just asking for that special brand of Bat-justice.

There’s always been one thing missing, though: The Batmobile.

The folks at Rocksteady Games have remedied this sad fact in the latest game in the series, Batman: Arkham Knight, and are showing off a car-porn-filled new trailer to whet our appetite. Check out this bad boy below.

Robert Pfaff is a young illustrator living in Michigan. He’s also a hard-core gamer with a love for all things pixellated, so he decided to combine both passions together and create this amazingly evocative set of digital artwork.

We found his work to be compelling, so asked Pfaff to choose his favorites and tell us a little about what they meant to him.

Pfaff is thinking about printing and selling his work on posters; if you’d like to encourage him, be sure to visit his artist page on Adobe’s portfolio site, Behance.

Source: Robert Pfaff

Your Ouya just got a little creepier thanks to the developer of creepy platforming game, Whispering Willows. The trailer (below) shows protagonist Elena as she searches for her missing father through innovative environmental puzzles and supernatural obstacles.

“[Elena] must harness the powers of her heritage,” writes developer David Logan on the Kickstarter page, “utilizing astral projection and other ethereal abilities to find her father before he, too becomes lost to the hopeless morass of the Willows estate.”

If that (and the trailer below) doesn’t have you dusting off your tiny Android-powered gaming cube, we don’t know what will.

Ubisoft’s highly-anticipated console and PC game, Watch Dogs, came out today. One of the cooler features of the release, though, at least from a mobile gaming standpoint, is an app for both iOS and Android that purports to be more than just a tie-in game, letting mobile players “hack into” the console version of the game to play a bit of cat-and-mouse via the mobile app.

As I grabbed the free Watch_Dogs Companion: ctOS Mobile app for my iPhone today (it’s also on the Google Play store), I was excited to drop into the futuristic setting and actually impact someone’s game.

Unfortunately, the excitement didn’t last long. When I tried to connect via the game’s Quick Match option, which connects mobile players to random console players for some head-to-head action, the app hung on the connection screen.

If you’re like me, spending $60 on a game these days is rare. I may have too many game consoles connected to my television, and I may have way too many games on my Steam account, not to mention my iOS devices, but every once in a while, a game shows up for the big screen that just makes me stop and start counting out the twenties.

Watch Dogs, coming out next Tuesday across the US for PlayStation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, is one of those games, and if the trailer below is any indication of how it’s going to feel playing it, I would spend twice as much to do so.

“I saw something no one was meant to see so they came after me,” says vengeance-minded protagonist, Aiden Pearce. “But someone fucked up and the wrong person died. Now, I’m coming for them.”

Itching to take on the future techno-war depicted in the hyper-realistic Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise? Well, if you’ve finished off the original Modern Warfare game on your Mac, ported in 2011 by Aspyr, it’s time to lock and load your weapon of choice for the next two installments in the series, Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3.

These huge sequels are available now for the Mac platform, on Steam or porting publisher Aspyr’s own GameAgent distribution service. The new Mac versions of the game have all the downloadable content (DLC) packs from each game ready for your first-person shooter marathon.

In the newest Wolfenstein game, out today for Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PC, you’ll play as Captain B.J. Blazkowicz, an American war hero out to take on the Nazi regime and the evil General Wilhelm Strasse.

In what might be the best homage to classic gaming I’ve ever seen, the new title has a beautifully recreated level from one of the original iterations of the popular gaming title Wolfenstein 3D, which came out in 1992 and made its way to every computing platform at the time, including the Apple II and Mac OS, and has recently been ported to iOS as well.

The video below shows this awesome throwback to the original game, blocky graphics and all, in what looks to be a dream sequence in The New Order.

Celebrities have been lending their voices and likenesses to video games for years, and you need only look at the voice-cast lists for big games like epic first-person shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops to see how prevalent they are.

But some appearances are more subtle, relevant or just straight-up awesome. Here are seven celebrity cameos that actually belong in their respective games.

Xbox One owners just got a shot in the arm as the team behind the acclaimed Halo franchise has just revealed a new iteration in the series: Halo 5: Guardians.

Halo has always been associated with the Xbox system, reaching back to Microsoft’s original console, released in 2001. With the latest title now in sights, Halo fans will start the salivation required of the lead up to the game industry’s most popular series.

This video by game video YouTube user NicksplosionFX is perhaps the most awesome thing you’re going to see all day.

It’s a shot by shot recreation of the stunningly fantastic Game of Thrones television show introduction sequence done in the style of Nintendo’s classic Super Mario Brothers video game.

Whether your a Game of Thrones fan, a classic Nintendo nerd, or a combination of the two, you’ll love that the video maker also has a side by side comparison of the two videos (below) so you can critique his recreation with all your righteous nerd fervor.

I suck at table tennis. Like, it’s embarrassing.

I’m alright at serving, and I can usually return, but if anyone smashes at all or puts any spin on the ball, I fold faster than a laundry robot. I still like the idea of table tennis, though, which is why I’m glad we have video-game versions.

And Table Tennis Touch, which is out now for all of your iOS devices, is easily the best one I’ve ever played.

Dong Nguygen struck App Store gold when Flappy Bird became the viral video game hit of the year in early 2014, but after seeing the addicting affects of flapping it first hand, Nguyen says he’s working on a new game that doesn’t involve feathery friends, green pipes or repetitive deaths.

Nguygen took to Twitter this afternoon to give fans a preview of his next his next addicting game by posting a screenshot showing a small helmeted man jumping between two buildings; simple, clean, and probably just as addictive as his original hit.