gaming - page 22

Just after we waxed rhapsodic about the new SteelSeries Stratus iOS 7 gaming controller comes a new controller to the news cycle, the Signal RP One.

If the picture above is any indication, this one is sized more like a typical console controller in the Xbox style than SteelSeries’ mini stature, which could bode well for Signal, as not everyone has the tiny hands to deal with a smaller controller device.

If you played the original Feed Me Oil a couple years ago, you probably fell in love with its surreal graphics and fun, physics-based puzzles. If you didn’t, the name is probably confusing the hell out of you. Because you really shouldn’t feed anything oil, right? That’s super gross.

Don’t get stuck on that, though, because Feed Me Oil 2 is out now, and it features the same addictive gameplay with shinier graphics and some new tools to get that oil where it needs to go.

And where it needs to go is, like, right into the mouth of a weird, animal-like hill or something. But again, don’t dwell on that because if you do, you’re missing out on a great game.

Interactive zombie film series The Hunting is back with its third installment, which has you continuing to make life-threatening choices and furiously tapping on your screen to run and fight off crazed undead who want to put the nom on you.

It’s another creepy, high-tension experience that will quickly make you regret playing it with headphones and/or in the dark, both of which I did because I clearly don’t know what’s good for me.

But while the game is still completely scary and harrowing as ever, it fails to build on Part 2’s impressive shotgun blast of terror and what-the-hell-ery.

I went into Ark Saver expecting it to flounder about like the Noah’s Ark mini game in Bible Adventures on NES. I’m incredibly surprised that it is not only playable but pretty addictive.

The goal in Ark Saver is to match the next animal in a long line with its pair as quickly as you can. Each level gives you 30 seconds to pair 50 or more sets, and each level introduces more creatures to match. To get the highest score, you’ll need to maintain a combo streak that breaks every time you tap the wrong picture. Luckily, the only harm breaking a combo repeatedly has is decreasing your overall score.

Okay, so you’ve mastered Super Crate Box, and you’re so good at Super Hexagon that you can’t play it anymore without yawning. And maybe you’ve also bested a Sasquatch at arm-wrestling, and you’re the King of the Oompa-Loompas because those two things are just as likely.

But if you like those other games and are looking for something “inspired by” them, you’d do well to check out Atomic+, a recently released arcade/twitch/minimal title that puts you in the position of an electron that can leap between atomic orbits and has a lot of stuff flying at it constantly.

So maybe not quite like an actual electron, but you get my point.

While adding physical controls instantly improves almost any mobile game, no one wants to carry around a big, bulky control pad all day. But it’s unlikely you’ll have any complaints about taking the iMpulse with you everywhere you go, because it’s so small it fits on your keyring — and it’s compatible with both Android and iOS devices.

There are still a ton of us who game on our Macs. If you’re one of those folks, you’ll know how great a platform the Mac can be. While there may not be as overwhelming an amount of games on Apple’s fantastic computer platform, the ones that are there are of high quality.

And? There are a ton more these days than ever before. 2013 was a great year to be a Mac gamer, with ports of a ton of the big titles of the year, including games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Sim City, and Bioshock Infinite.

A bunch of iOS games came to the bigger screens of the Mac, too, with fantastic, hit titles like tower offense, Anomaly 2 and Solstice Arena, a speed massively online battle arena (MOBA) game from Zynga that has some legs, and some smaller indie gems like Gentlemen! from Lucky Frame.

Whether you like the big blockbuster games or the more cerebral indie ones, the Mac platform has a plethora of gaming experiences to choose from. Here are the best ones we’ve seen.

Gaming publisher extraordinaire Square Enix just emailed us here at Cult of Mac to tell us that it has added quite a few more titles, most of them from arcade game publisher, Taito, to the big iOS Holiday Sale.

Most of the games below are 50 to 60 percent off the usual prices, so if you’re in the market (or just the mood) for some great retro iOS games, this is your chance. The sale lasts through January 6, so don’t take too long to head on over to the App Store.

Look, gaming is a big thing, right? You can’t swing a dead cat in an ugly holiday sweater without hitting someone who’s busily involved in some kind of gaming screen these days, and iOS has the clear advantage with the hundreds of thousands of games on offer, all of which are fairly inexpensive or free to play.

We’ve taken some of the effort out of finding the best games of the past year, with this mega-list of over 20 iOS games (in no particular order) that you really should check out right away. Except where noted, all these games will work on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. Because, really, there’s no excuse for not making a game work universally these days.

I love games like Canabalt, even though a world of tricky endless runners flowed from that simple endless platformer’s success. Last Bunny takes the Canabalt style and introduces tilt controls along with jumping to give you more control over the fearless rabbit bounding over buildings.

You play as, well, the last adorable bunny in a world overrun by those grumpy stone blocks from Super Mario Bros. games and missiles. You jump from building to building trying to avoid bombs and pitfalls. Unlike Canabalt, you have control over the speed at which the bunny runs. By tilting your phone to the right or left, you can increase or decrease his movement to make jumping more precise. This is very helpful when blocks fall just outside the rabbit’s jump distance which will ultimately lead you to running into them unless you’re moving at a slower speed.

The famous Square Enix tax, defined as the premium price the Japanese video game company has always charged for its ports of classic and new RPG games on the iTunes App Store, seems to be up–for a while, at least.

We’re talking huge discounts, like recently released Deus Ex: The Fall, originally debuting at seven bucks, now only $0.99, and The World Ends With You (perhaps my favorite Square Enix game of all time) at half the regular $20 price.

How about Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II, classics in the role playing game genre, at half off, each going for $3.99 on the App Store? There are eight other Final Fantasy titles on sale, as well. Yeah, I thought you’d like that.

Sure, The Room Two is a sequel to Fireproof Games’ original effort, The Room, but more of the same, with bigger and better puzzles is most definitely not the worst thing in the world.

Check out our video of the tutorial level of The Room Two below to get a sense of the game, and decide whether you’ll want to purchase the game right away.

Wait, what am I saying? Of course you’re going to want to.

Aspyr has figured out how to shrink an entire galaxy (one far, far away, of course) onto the iPhone and iPod; all the Wookies, Jawas, Jedis, Tusken Raiders and bounty hunters — all now made tinier as Aspyr updates the previously iPad-only Knights of the Old Republic as a Universal App.

To celebrate this feat of quantum mechanics (or simple coding, your pick) Aspyr has slashed the app’s price in half, from $10 to $5.

Old people probably remember Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, a game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System about Little Mac, a tiny boxer rising through the ranks by defeating opponents so much larger that they look like they could swallow Mac whole with very little difficulty.

It’s an underdog story that owed a lot to films like Rocky and The Karate Kid — movies that helped to create that most honored of sports-story traditions: the training montage.

Endless Boss Fight, a new free-to-play game from developer White Milk Studios, is basically a perpetual game version of those montages.

The Apache helicopter in Apache Candy is more like a friend to Jay Jay the Jet Plane than a fierce combat copter. He’s the little pink and purple avenger that could, and all he wants is to collect candy.

Apache Candy is another infinite side-scrolling shooter on iOS, but the cheery graphics are what drew me to it. It reminds me of the retro game Twinbee and other cute-em-up shooters that have you blasting your way through screen after screen of adorable-yet-lethal enemies. Apache Candy is nowhere near as deep–you’re really only collecting candy and trying not to die–but the look was enough to satisfy.

Australian-based developer Halfbrick is at it again, with free-to-play Colossatron: Massive World Threat, now available around the globe.

You’ll take on the role of the humungous mechanical robot Colossatron on your quest to utterly destroy city after city, using various colored robotic modules to give your wanton destruction just a little extra oomph.

Yeah, color-matching doesn’t sound that fun, but this one? It really is.

The Colossatron is a mysterious, robotic dragon-thing that drops out of space specifically to destroy cities. Nobody knows what it is or where it came from; all we know is that it must be destroyed before it destroys us.

Nobody even knows how to control it, and that includes anyone playing the game.

Colossatron: Massive World Threat is the latest from Jetpack Joyride developer Halfbrick, and it’s the studio’s most esoteric title yet. And this is the team that also made a game about chopping fruit while avoiding bombs that, while possessing fuses, apparently only explode if they get cut.

So, yeah. It’s even weirder than that.

The new Walking Dead: The Game Trailer looks creepy as hell.

It’s been a year since Telltale’s first Walking Dead game came out and scared the crap out of all of us. Now Telltale has just released the first episode of the second season, titled appropriately enough The Walking Dead: Season Two.

Check out the trailer (rated M) below.

That headline isn’t hyperbole. I’ve started this review three times, but I kept thinking of things I should “check out” in the game so that I could make sure I was writing the thing properly. But mainly, I just wanted to keep playing the new Adventure Time version of Ski Safari.

If you haven’t played the original, it’s a twist on the endless runner genre: The endless skier. The hapless hero has to give it all he has to outrun an avalanche that is barreling down the hill behind him. He can do backflips for points and can hitch rides on the local wildlife for speed boosts, and all the while, he’s collecting as many coins as he can.

Ski Safari: Adventure Time is the same thing only with 100 percent fewer skis and way more characters from Pendleton Ward’s awesome cartoon series. So basically, it’s better in every way.

Nightmare: Malaria is the story of a little girl with malaria. In her dreams, she is thrust into a horrible nightmare world where she is trying to save her teddy bears from a horrible world infested with malaria-carrying mosquitoes and vats of bubbling disease. Your goal is to guide her through the world and hide in screened tents to ward off the infected bugs.

You can download the game for free, but between each level you’ll see a prompt for a microtransaction. This won’t unlock features in the game, and you don’t need to contribute money to win, but the $3 purchase is actually a donation toward providing mosquito nets to people at risk for contracting malaria. You can donate as often as you want, and the whole game is designed to educate players on the dangers of the disease. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Against Malaria Foundation work tirelessly to help eradicate malaria, but your small contribution can provide preventative measures to people who can’t help themselves.

Alright, so they’re the “AntiSquad” because they’re a ragtag bunch of misfits with little in common who still manage to pull together and get the job done when it counts. But sometimes headlines are hard.

AntiSquad is a new tactical game with a cartoonish art style and a whole lot of things to tap on. If you’ve played games like Breach & Clear or Final Fantasy Tactics, you get the general idea: Your group and the enemy take turns moving across a map trying to get into position to attack or outmaneuver each other. You have grids and buffs and cooldowns and all that other genre-standard stuff.

And other than its cool art, “genre-standard” is the best way I can think of to describe this game.

Square Enix announced Tuesday the release of the very first Tomb Raider, the initial game in a long-running franchise that has spawned sequels across console platforms, PC, the Mac, and even a couple of movies.

The release today to the iPhone and iPad is a direct port of the original game, complete with charming old school graphics and gameplay. And buttons. Lots of crappy virtual onscreen buttons.

Even though there are a ton of games out there that have refined this type of gameplay that you can get for a similar price, you’ll surely get to see where this popular genre got its start.

The inevitable fate of all popular mascots to eventually end up in a go kart. Take a look at Mario, Crash Bandicoot, Sonic, and many other iconic video game mascot characters and you’ll find they’ve all squished themselves into a car at some point. Well, now the Angry Birds are, too.

Angry Birds Go is a free-to-play karting adventure full of repetition and cool-down meters. Unlocking aesthetically pleasing carts means putting in real money, and your spirited birdy racers get tired after a short while. Beyond that, Go is a completely average racer.

I don’t know why characters in endless runner games are always in such a big hurry.

Sure, Runbot was fleeing the secret lab that created him. And the guy in Temple Run has that whole “killer demon monkeys” thing going on, so he’s cool.

But Rez, the hero of the new endless runner Galaxy Run, is just headed home. Why’s he gotta be Mr. Perpetual Motion all the time? It just gets him killed a lot.

Looking at the Facebook Games Of The Year list, it’s pretty clear what Facebook gamers enjoy. A majority of the 22 titles are casual, with hits like Candy Crush and Farmville 2. One comment heard around the Cult of Mac writer’s room was, “Who’s ever heard of these games?”

The one game that stands out is Disruptor Beam’s Game of Thrones Ascent, a fairly mid-core gaming title. We asked Jon Radoff, CEO and founder of Disruptor Beam, how it feels to rise to the top of Facebook’s casual-game environment.

“I think Facebook wanted to develop a list that contains some of the most popular games in the world (like Candy Crush) but they also made an effort to include innovative and more unique games,” Radoff told Cult of Mac by email. “Game of Thrones Ascent stands out among the games because we created something new: a story-driven strategy game, which nobody knew would work on Facebook until we tried.”