gaming - page 29

iOS 7 provides two new features under the hood that will blow the lid off mobile gaming: game controllers and a sprite animation and particle physics engine. While these may not sound super sexy, they have the potential to revolutionize the way we play games on our mobile devices. The first is a recognition that many games really need physical buttons to provide high-end gaming experiences, while the second is a step toward supporting game developers in the way that development engines like Unreal and Unity already do, but built right in to the operating system. Together, these two developments are nothing less than—forgive the pun—complete game changers. Mobile gaming is already a big business for game developers, publishers, and Apple. And while Apple has never put gaming front and center before, that’s going to change with iOS 7. Gaming is already huge; now it’s going to get even bigger.

As we noted earlier this week, iOS 7 includes some code that will allow third party manufacturers create universal controllers for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch using Apple’s latest mobile operating system. It’s groundbreaking stuff, especially for a traditionally game-averse tech company, but we’re starting to see the first wave of controllers to come out.

Sometimes, mindless dungeon crawling, at least within a video game, is good. I’ve never actually crawled a real dungeon, to be honest.

While I love deep, story-based games, sometimes I just want to roll around pixel-based catacombs, corridors, and rooms, bashing or blasting hordes of baddies as they converge upon my location.

Developer OrangePixel (Gunslugs, Meganoid) has figured out how to perfectly encapsulate the dungeon crawling experience within a pixel-perfect arcade eye-candy shell.

We met with Morgan Belford, Game It Forward’s co-founder, when we hit PAX last month, and he told us about his company’s new game, Quingo, a free-to-play mix of trivia and bingo for iOS. The game lets players of all skill levels, including kids, play the trivia game to earn money for some great charitable causes, including the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Kiva, PAWS, Seattle Children’s, Splash, and The Martinez Foundation.

“We want to make sure our players can see the concrete results of their contributions, so we worked hard with our charity partners to define specific projects that will receive the funds,” said Belford in a statment. “To that end, players can see how much they’ve contributed and how well each project is doing.”

If you like trivia, it’s a great way to give something back while playing a game. Not too shabby, for sure.

I’m really not a fan of trivia games. Any time someone drags out Trivial Pursuit at a party, I’m the first to come up with an excuse not to play. But You Don’t Know Jack was always different. It’s a trivia game with attitude, a sense of humor, and a weird bald mascot. What’s not to like?

The original game launched in 1995, and now it’s on iOS with a new title: You Don’t Know Jack Party. This is a new, live multiplayer version of the trivia game that lets you connect up to four different iOS devices to one Apple TV and play together in the same room on the big screen, via a secondary, free JackPad controller app.

Sure, there’s also a single player experience, but it won’t be as much fun.

Puzzle Knights is a match-three game with tactical strategy, light RPG elements, and online arena battles created by Mojaro, a developer made up of some pretty experienced game development folks, like founder Laurent Ancessi, who has worked in the gaming industry for over 25 years, with a bunch of top gaming companies, like Electronic Arts, Sony, Radical Entertainment, and Naughty Dog.

The game has just launched into the app store, and is looking pretty good. Check out the launch trailer below.

Calling it the “first Speed MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena),” Zynga released Solstice Arena to the iOS App Store this past June. The game garnered many awards and some fairly good reviews from around the web.

Tuesday, Zynga announced that Solstice Arena was available in the Mac App Store, bringing the streamlined real-time action battle arena game to OS X.

If you love tanks but find your standard-size garage and local laws too restrictive, you might want to check out Boom! Tanks, a free-to-play armored combat game by developer Codemasters.

This love letter to all things treaded and turreted tells the story of one group of people with tanks squaring off against a less-good group of people with tanks, and — look, it’s called Boom! Tanks. You can probably guess what you’re signing up for.

Combat in Boom! Tanks works like this: At the beginning of the round, you drag and hold an aiming cursor over your enemy in order to lock it into your targeting system. Once this is done, you will always hit; the question becomes how hard. And you figure that out with a timing-based minigame in which you try to stop a marker as close to the middle of the meter at the bottom of the screen as you can. Stopping it directly in the middle grants you a “Perfect Shot” which does more damage. Meanwhile, the game drives your tank around; you don’t even have to worry about that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncyN-LTKTMw&feature=youtu.be

Just after CES wound down back in January, I was part of a (relatively) small group of journalists and bloggers present at the Disney media event that revealed Disney’s Infinity game universe to the world. Problem was, I had no clue why I’d been invited, as all the hoopla was about the console game. Toward the end, I bumped into Bill Roper, Disney’s product development chief, and asked why I was there as I gulped down a delicious, miniature milkshake.

His answer was cryptic. But the reason I’d been invited has just made its entrance onto the app store today — it’s the Disney Infinity: Toy Box iPad app, a virtual sandbox mashup that allows anyone with an iPad to take a variety of Disney characters and play with them in different Disney worlds. And it’s free — for now.

I really expected better of Disney.

A company that famous for creating, maintaining, and promoting franchises really should have known better than to end the first game of an almost guaranteed series with a question mark. So then the sequel comes around, and it’s called Where’s My Water? 2. Look at that 2. It’s just stuck out there alone, looking all awkward. I really feel bad for the little guy. I don’t know why Disney didn’t just call this game something like, Seriously, Where’s My Water?. Total missed opportunity to raise the stakes.

Oh, the game? Yeah, it’s pretty good.

TouchArcade found this little addition in the latest update to Fox Digital Entertainment’s AVP: Evolution, a note in the update features list that claims iOS 7 Controller support.

Robot Loves Kitty is the husband and wife team that lived in a treehouse to save money while they ran a Kickstarter project for the game that became Legend of Dungeon.

It’s out now on Mac, PC, and Linux, and it’s a brilliant combination of high tech, retro-graphics, and a strong sense of irony, not to mention whimsy. When I chatted with Alix Stolzer (Kitty) at PAX this year, she mentioned that she and Caleb Goble (Robot) liked vastly different types of games, so they decided to make one they could play together.

From those humble beginnings, they’ve succeeded, at least, in making a game that allows up to four players to explore procedurally generated dungeons together, to fight various monsters, explore environments, and try to stay alive. The game works with keyboard and mouse or console-style controllers, with a real-time battle system. Also, there are funny hats! If you take some time to give this one a play; you won’t be disappointed.

Alright, stop me if you’ve heard this one:

An unseen protagonist, armed only with a flashlight, sets off on an investigation into some spooky woods. With no map, our hero wanders through the forest gathering a bunch of pages for unknown reasons with a shadowy, black-clad figure in pursuit. The tormentor can appear anywhere at will, and if you look at it too long, the game will end, and you will have to start over from the beginning.

If you think that sounds an awful lot like developer Parsec Productions’ instant classic Slender: The Eight Pages, you would be correct. But that’s also the premise of 3 Cubes Research Limited’s less ominously named The Woods, which is available now for iPhone and iPad.

I’m not really sure what else to say; The Woods is Slender with more pages, a less scary antagonist, and worse controls.

Evan loved it, which made us want to try it. And try The Room we did, finding it to be a gorgeous, brain-engaging, Myst-like exploration of the puzzle genre, with some amazing 3D mind-benders to solve.

Here’s our video showing us solving the third chapter; we’ve condensed it a bit so that you’ll still have to do your own puzzle solving, though.

There are a bunch of video games out on iOS for kids, from educational games to adventure games and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.

We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.

Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of video games on the App Store that they’re playing.

This week, it’s endless faller, Daddy Was A Thief, from indie dev Cezary Rajkowski. It’s available in the App Store for $1.99 now.

I’m going to come clean on something: I really hate Sudoku.

I don’t know what it is about it; maybe it’s because it’s supplanted my beloved crossword as the go-to newspaper puzzle. Maybe it’s because I suspect that one could throw logic aside and accidentally solve it, possibly while drinking. Or maybe it’s just because it’s popular, and my Grinch heart is two sizes too small.

Whatever the reason, my heart or my booze, I’m not a fan. So I didn’t really expect to like FlowDoku, a shape-focused version of my puzzle nemesis by developer Hapafive. Turns out I was wrong, and I learned a very important lesson about prejudice.

Days of Wonder‘s Small World was the first ever cardboard-and-plastic board game to jump the digital chasm and become an iPad board game; the game actually made its debut the same day the iPad went on sale, over three years ago.

In the intervening years, Days of Wonder has neglected the digital version of Small World somewhat, and instead concentrated heavily on its best-known title, the massively popular Ticket to Ride (of which there is now a bewildering assortment of variations — both physical and digital — available for play).

But now, finally, the indy game company has come back to the game that started it all and released Small World 2 on the iPad — a huge, socially rich sequel that should make board-game fans very happy once the sticker shock has abated.

I’ve played as a lot of things in my gaming career. I’ve been vampires, I’ve been space marines, and there was even a brief time back in 1993 where I was a walking circle with sunglasses. I’ve never played as a rock, though, so developer PikPok’s latest offering, Giant Boulder of Death, intrigued me right away.

The makers of the Erasure-loving endless runner Robot Unicorn Attack series have moved the camera around to the back to create an “endless roller” of sorts in which players control a giant boulder on a mission of revenge.

The plot — yes, there is one — is that the denizens of the village below the boulder’s mountain have stolen his girlfriend (a slightly smaller boulder with a bow) and used “her” to make a statue of their local military hero. Boulder immediately swears vendetta, freeing himself from the mountaintop on which he is precariously perched and setting off on a rampage of rolling crushery.

It’s pretty much as fun as it sounds.

Remember that amazing trailer that Apple introduced on stage yesterday to show of its new iPhone 5s? It was Infinity Blade III, what Epic Games’ Donald Mustard called, “The conclusion of the epic Infinity Blade trilogy.”

If anything, the trailer below shows off just how amazing mobile gaming can look like. Just like the last two entries in the franchise, Infinity Blade III is pushing the envelope on environment size as well as visual and gaming performance. Here’s the video to feast your eyes on.

I’m going to get right to it here: The Room, an escape game by developer Fireproof Studios, is the best mobile title I’ve ever played. You can read the rest of the review if you want, but it’s basically going to be versions of that.

I know “best ever” is a bold statement, though, so let me back it up: The Room, which is available for both iPad and iPhone–the latter as The Room Pocket, I assume because it fits in your pocket and not because it’s about a pocket in which someone stores rooms–has beautiful graphics, clever puzzles, and simple, responsive touch controls that actually work.

Apple brought Donald Mustard, co-founder of ChAIR entertainment, up on stage today at the iPhone keynote in Cupertino. Mustard talked about the incredible performance of the new 64-bit A7 chip, saying the new iPhone 5s was five times as fast as the original iPhone 5.

The demo onstage was reported by live-bloggers as stutter-free and gorgeous. Mustard said that the conclusion to the Infinity Blade Trilogy, Infinity Blade III, has huge areas to explore, each one larger than the original size of the entire original Infinity Blade game itself.

Infinity Blade III will be available alongside the iPhone 5s when it releases. Last year’s game got canned, so hopefully it actually ships this time.

Image: Techcrunch

For those of us waiting for a hardcore iPad version of massively online battle arena (MOBA) game like League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients, Open Feint founder Jason Citron might have the solution. His latest gaming company, Hammer & Chisel, has been hard at work creating the tablet-only MOBA, Fates Forever.

We spoke with Citron a while back about the development challenge of a more core game for iPads. Citron calls this one a “reinterpretation of the world’s most popular hardcore game,” Riot Games’ League of Legends, for tablets like the iPad.

Check out the video below.

Gamestop-owned Kongregate games has gotten into the mobile gaming space recently, and the latest published by the online gaming portal, Sheep Happens, has a lot going for it.

Sheep Happens throws just about everything at players, like wacky characters, missions to complete, and plenty of power-ups to earn and/or purchase. While the humor is a bit over the top, the gameplay finds a pretty decent balance between difficult and engaging gameplay fairly early on. For players willing to spend some time and/or a little bit of cash, the later game ramps up nicely, making Sheep Happens a nice diversion for those of us who haven’t gotten sick of the endless runner.

One of my favorite things ever is Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast based on H.G. Wells’ Martian-invasion novel, The War of the Worlds. If you’ve never heard it and have a free hour, here’s a link. Just come back when you’re done.

Codename Cygnus is an interactive radio drama from developer Reactive Studios. And if you liked the storytelling, acting, and music in Welles’ production, it’s for you. If you thought it was cheesy and overly dramatic, you should try Cygnus anyway. Here’s why.

It’s finally here! Terraria for iOS brings the 2D Minecraft-inspired crafting, mining, and fighting open-world game to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, and boy is it fun!

Developer 505 Games spent a ton of time making this work well on the touchscreen, and it shows, with controls that, while they take some getting used to, work really well to bring the complexity of a game like Terraria to our favorite gaming devices. Here’s a video of a bit of the tutorial, so you can see for yourself.