gaming - page 50

One of the greatest things about App Store games is that they’ve broken the seemingly relentless escalation of costs for developers and price-increases for end users. In a sense, many of the games on the store return us to the halcyon days of 8-bit games—playable, quickfire efforts that innovated and packed in plenty of personality.

Over at creature24.com, three guys are about to take this idea to the extreme, taking a skeleton idea for an iPhone game through to App Store submission—all in just 24 hours. Progress will be shown live on the website on March 6, starting at 9:00am EST, and the trio of devs say comments from visitors might even be integrated into the game. I caught up with one of the three crazy game creators, Binary Hammer‘s Bob Koon, to find out more.

We reported two weeks ago that Capcom was planning on bringing Street Fighter 4, to the App Store despite the iPhone and iPod Touch’s lack of waggling physical controls… but now we can see exactly how the iconic fighting game will play on Apple’s line-up of touchscreen handsets thanks to a recently released trailer.

We already knew Valve was bringing its popular Steam games delivery service to OS X thanks to some Mac-specific files floating around the latest PC beta, but you can now pretty much take it as read: the Half-Life 2 developer has been releasing a slew of images slathering the Apple coating across their most popular gaming franchise.

So far, Valve has released images of Half-Life 2‘s Gordon Freeman wearing an iMacified HEV suit, replete with Apple logo instead of the Black Mesa Lambda symbol; the Team Fortress 2 Heavy eating a sandwich in the style of the dancing silhouette iPod ads; turrets from both Team Fortress 2 and Portal (a game which boasts a very Mac-inspired visual design scheme) doing the “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” dance; Left 4 Dead’s Francis mocking the iconic “Think Different” series of ads; a Steam-specific take-off of the first “Introducing Macintosh” advertisement (courtesy of RPS); and Half-Life 2’s Alyx transported into the famous “1984” commercial (via Macworld).

We’ve got all the images after the jump, At the barest minimum, though, OS X is about to get a proper digital delivery platform for games, and native ports of Valve’s greatest games. Rare good news indeed for the dedicated Mac gamer.

There’s reason enough to arch a wry eyebrow at yet another classic platformer with a virtual control overlay ported to the App Store, and Gameloft’s newest iPhone gaming release, Rayman 2: The Great Escape is no exception, even at $6.99.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaD_WEYOLTA

The guys over at Vimov has given Touch Arcade a great first-look at their port of Hexen II a great fantasy-themed FPS built upon the venerable Quake engine in 1997.

It’s an impressive port: it runs fluidly, it has a surprisingly innovative control scheme and only the music is missing. The big problem here, though, is that there’ll just never be any way to play it on a non-jailbroken iPhone unless Vimov can ink a deal with Activision, the owners of the Hexen franchise.

The problem is that while Hexen II’s executable is open source, the game data isn’t. The Hexen II GPL license allows for non-commercial redistribution, so Vimov could potentially knock this port up to the App Store as a free product… but since Apple doesn’t officially support a method for users to transfer their own files (like Hexen II’s game data files) to the iPhone for third-party programs to use as they see fit, the app would never be improved.

Still, it’s impressive work, and there is still some hope that Vimov and Activision can work something out: Hexen II was one of my favorite games back as a LAN-going nineteen year old, and I’d happily drop a fin or two for the pleasure of playing it on my iPhone.

If you’re like me, the last fortnight has seen little activity other than watching Olympic skiing, skating, curling, hockey, luge, bobsled, Nordic Combined, curling, complaints about NBC, curling, aerials, and curling. With the Closing Ceremonies now a rapidly fading memory of Shatner songs and giant inflatable beavers, there’s never been a better time to start slowly weaning yourself off the XXIst Winter Olympiad. And there really isn’t a better option than the deceptively simple “Vancouver 2010,” the well-made official iPhone game of the recently departed Winter Games.

I’m a long-time fan of territory games. Civilization sucked me in on the Amiga and its sequel appealed on the Mac. For quicker games in a similar vein, various Risk clones for the Mac (such as iConquer) once took up numerous tiny chunks of my day. But when I discovered Galcon for iPhone, the others vanished. Here was a crazy real-time Risk/stripped-down Civ, with brutally fast gameplay and land-grabbing. In single-player mode, it was compelling, and against online opposition, a joy.

Creator Phil Hassey announced this week Galcon Fusion for desktop platforms. A semi-sequel to Classic Galcon and incorporating modes and ideas from Galcon Labs for iPhone, Galcon Fusion is available for $9.99 from galcon.com.

I caught up with Phil to find out more about his game, cross-platform development, and why iPhone Galcon fans should take a risk on the desktop game.

Humorously pitting herbology against zombology, Popcap’s superb tower defense game Plants vs. Zombies was a long time coming to the iPhone… but once it the excellent port finally hit, it was destined to be a success.

I doubt even Popcap, though, realized exactly how much of a runaway hit they had on their hands, though. They’ve just issued a press release, announcing (with just a hint of stupefaction) that Plants vs. Zombies sold over 300,000 copies in its first nine days.

Costing just $2.99 on the App Store, that means that they’ve brought in just a little under a million dollars on the game since its release. Popcap’s a big name in casual indie gaming, sure, but even so: that’s real walking around money.

They deserve the success. Plants vs. Zombies for the iPhone is such an excellent port that it’s actually easy to forget it hits desktop machines first: playing it on an iPhone just feels like how it was always meant to be played.

I only hope the success of Plants vs. Zombies galvanizes Popcap to continue to add some of the desktop version’s excellent minigames, puzzles and survival modes to the iPhone version, perhaps as in-app purchases. Once you hit a certain skill level in Plants vs. Zombies, Endless Survival is just the only way to play, and I’d easily drop another $5 on PvZ if Popcap gave me the option to do so.

Every couple of years, Square-Enix dusts off the first couple of games of the Final Fantasy series, gives them a vigorous spit polish and then throws them on the gaming handheld du jour. So if you haven’t played Final Fantasy I or II on the original NES, PSP, PlayStation, GBA, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, ad infinitim… good news! You can now pick up both Final Fantasy I and FInal Fantasy II are now available over on the App Store.

The original Final Fantasy game includes five bonus dungeons, as well as the Soul of Chaos and Labyrinth of Time extras added to some of the more recent ports of the game. As for Final Fantasy II, you also get five bonus dungeons, as well as the Soul of Rebirth and Arcane Labyrinth packs.

These classic RPGs will keep you busy for dozens of hours, so from that perspective, $9 is a steal… but I’ve never personally felt that the first couple of Final Fantasy games aged particularly well, and while the new sprite work is undeniably attractive, the gameplay and story in the games seem more like an archeological curiosity of modern gaming than anything I’d want to revisit. So I’ll hold on to my $18 for now… but wake me up when Square-Enix gets around to porting Final Fantasy VI to iPhone OS, would you?

When researching a recent article for TechRadar, about great iPhone games that should be ported to iPad, I asked a few devs about their plans for the platform. Most remained tight-lipped, but Reto Senn was happy to spill a few beans regarding Orbital, an absurdly addictive one-thumb orb-destruction game that’s currently my favourite iPhone app, and which was seen demoed on iPad at Apple’s recent press event.

“It was a surprise for us that Orbital appeared on the iPad and was playable at the press event. We didn’t know about this beforehand,” says Reto. “We’ve looked into the possibilities [for iPad] and we’ve decided to create an iPad-specific release, dubbed Orbital HD. The new version will have pin-sharp textures so the game takes advantage of the higher resolution screen. We’re also re-designing the user interface, because the bezel, larger screen and weight of the device will have users hold the iPad in a different position to iPhone, in order to play Orbital.”

In terms of gameplay, Reto reveals that although gameplay will stay the same “so highscores will be comparable with the iPhone version,” there are plans in the works to add some unique features to Orbital HD: “We’re designing a two-player mode so it can be played like a table-top arcade game. Multiplayer is one of our favourite features of Orbital and the iPad is the perfect device for that kind of gameplay—with its large screen it’s like a portable table-top arcade game.”

For more on Orbital, visit www.orbital-game.com. The iPhone version’s available for $1.99 on the App Store and has twice received our ‘app of the week’ award.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNqVvIbroRA

Gamers looking for a solid digital delivery platform on the Mac are notoriously hard up. Actually, scratch that: Mac gamers are notoriously hard up.

The good news here, then, is that recent betas of Valve Software’s popular Steam delivery system contain files that strongly hint that the “App Store for Windows Games” service is coming to OS X. These files are a new “osx.menu” file and graphics for Mac window buttons.

The bad news, unfortunately, is it’s not likely to make much difference: one of the reasons Steam is so great on Windows is because it has tens of thousands of games available for it. The library on the Mac is far more paltry, and OS X gamers are simply better off using Steam through Boot Camp to play the latest games than waiting two to four years for a company to maybe get around to releasing a sloppy OS X port of a game the PC world has already forgotten about.

Steam’s a great service, so I don’t doubt it’ll be useful… but publishers aren’t getting any more serious about OS X as a gaming platform. If you’re not on iPhone OS, Apple gaming is just pretty much dead. The best can be said about this development is that it may indicate that Valve is interested in porting its own games to OS X, all of which require Steam in order to run. Team Fortress 2 or Portal on the Mac is a pretty thought, but hardly likely to revolutionize anything.

Here in Arizona, the general rule is to keep our hands away from anything that sounds like it has even the remotest chance of being prickly or having fangs. Strange then, that my fingers seem magnetically drawn to the triadic snake emblem on the palmrest of Razer’s Orochi Bluetooth mouse. The little sleek black gadget is like crack for my hand.

A potentially revolutionary way to stream next-gen video games to hardware technically too underpowered to run those titles natively, thin client OnLive might be the best thing to happen to gaming since, well, the Internet.

Essentially, the technology works by making a game into an interactive, streaming video, rendering all the gameplay on a beefy server, compressing the video and shooting it off to you as you play. Imagine, for example, playing a shooter like Crysis — which can cripple even a top-of-the-line PC — on your iPhone. Actually, scratch that, because you don’t really have to: at this year’s DICE Summit in Las Vegas, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman gave a brief demonstration of Crysis running on Apple’s handheld.

If the idea of playing full-featured, next-gen games on your iPhone doesn’t get you excited, it gets better: Perlman has also confirmed that OnLive will support tablets, clearly giving a wink and a nod to the iPad.

The only question is: will OnLive be able to solve the latency issues inherent in the thin client gaming approach? Perlman swears it’s feasible, as long as each OnLive user is within 100 miles of a server, but a high ping’s a deadly thing in an FPS. OnLive could very well be a revolution… but at the end of the day, I think we’ll be more likely to be playing slower-paced games like Civilization V through our iPad OnLive client than Crysis.

In the 1980s, a Mario-like platformer was reportedly brutally slain by Nintendo lawyers. Two decades later, the game has made its way to iPhone and iPod touch (and, presumably, Nintendo’s lawyers have chilled out a little). The game in question: Giana Sisters. Cult of Mac spoke to Nico Kaartinen of developer Bad Monkee about how and why a cult 8-bit classic was remade for Apple handhelds.

I’ve always been fond of the Rolando series by Ngmoco: I think they were the first App Store games that showed me that the iPhone could be just as serious a gaming platform as the Nintendo DS or PSP.

I really liked the first couple of games, which is why it’s a shame that Ngmoco is now telling IGN that they are cancelling the third game, essentially because they can’t make it a “freemium” title.

What they mean by that is that Ngmoco wants all of their games to be free to download through the App Store, and they will make their money selling in-app purchases like extra levels, characters, etc. They’ve had great luck with this model with their Eliminate Pro shooter… but they just can’t figure out how to make this model work for Rolando 3.

It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me: surely, Rolando 3 could make its development budget back even without the “freemium” aspect, and I don’t really understand why Ngmoco can’t just sell expansion levels and different skins if they are intent on the freemium model.

Either way, it’s sad: the Rolando games are still really cute, and I’ll always remember them as the titles that first got me to take the iPhone seriously as a gaming handset.

I’ve always had trouble explaining my addiction to Keita Takahashi’s surrealist puzzle-action game Katamari Damacy to people who have never had the psychotropic thrill of rolling up a giant ball of cows, schooners and sea monsters for the approval of the binge-drinking, rainbow-clad King of All Cosmos.

If you’re one of those people, and if that last sentence didn’t make a lick of sense to you, then I’m going to have an even harder time describing Takahashi’s follow-up title, Noby Noby Boy, in which the worm-like, quadrupedal BOY must stretch his ever-lengthening abdominal section across the map to reach his one true love, GIRL. So let’s just leave it at the fact that a port of Noby Noby Boy has hit the iTunes App Store for $1.99 and call it a day, shall we?

Except I really can’t, because Noby Noby Boy looks like a very different game on the iPhone. In fact, it isn’t even being placed under the “Games” section, but is rather listed as a Productivity app. Indeed, it doesn’t seem like much of a game at all: according to the App Store Listing, you can use BOY to become the hands of a clock, use BOY‘s body as a notepad and use the GPS unit to stretch BOY according to how far you’ve traveled in the real world?

Neat? Jeez, I don’t even know. Who would have thought that Takahashi could have taken the weirdest game he’s ever made and turned it into an even weirder iPhone productivity app? It’s only 2 bucks, though, so what the hell.

Hadouken! Although Street Fighter IV almost obliges its players to invest in a special arcade stick in order to be playable even on next-gen consoles, Capcom’s still going to try to bring its famous fighting game to the iPhone and iPod Touch… although the virtual joystick should be enough to arch the eyebrows of anyone who has pumped a quarter into a Street Fighter arcade machine.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k0V4Zk4Nqs

We told you a few weeks ago that Square|Enix was bringing classic titles from its long-running RPG series Final Fantasy to the iPhone. Today, we bring you the first footage of the game in action (and a screenshot showing the interface).

Looks tasty, though I admit I’ll be more excited when Final Fantasy IV comes to the iPhone. That’s a must-download. And don’t even get me started on Chrono Trigger…

Via TouchArcade

The iPhone already plays Doom better than just about any smartphone out there thanks to iD Mobile’s continuing interest in porting their older titles and releasing iPhone-specific spin-off games of their more popular franchises to the App Store… but years before the iPhone’s debut, I was playing Doom RPG on my little Motorola RAZR.

Doom RPG was a great little game that did the impossible: it translated the frenetic first-person action of Doom into a wonderful, story-rich, turn-based RPG perfect for playing on a cell phone’s numeric keypad.

Ever since I got my iPhone, I’ve wished that iD Mobile would port it on over to the App Store… and while they still haven’t done so, they’ve done one better, releasing a sequel for the iPhone and iPod Touch called Doom II RPG. It’s available on the App Store now for $4.

My only question: who is that egghead shooting the demon in the screenshot? That’s not the bloodied, Schwarzenegger-esque marine I remember from Doom days gone by.

When I was a kid, there were lots of gaming platforms, but several failed due to existing IP. A prime example is the Commodore 128. Commodore touted the computer’s C64 compatibility as a major plus, but it meant no-one created C128 games, because loads of C64 ones already existed. The same, to some extent, went for the Amstrad CPC, which got loads of duff ports from the ZX Spectrum, due to some shared architecture. I wonder how iPad will fare. Apple’s device not only resembles a giant iPod touch—it also runs almost all existing App Store content. You get apps sitting centrally in the screen or ‘pixel doubled’.

With nearly 30 million iPhones and millions of iPod touches in the wild, and many thousands of games available, I wonder how many devs will target iPad, and how many will just continue developing for Apple’s already popular handhelds. If the former happens—and developers take a punt, hoping Apple’s new device will become as successful as iPhone and iPod touch—you end up with another top-quality gaming platform from out of nowhere. If not—which could so easily be the case—iPad will be a pretty device playing games that look OK, but were ultimately designed for another system. Here’s hoping the former’s the case.

This article originally appeared on Revert to Saved.

Way back when the iPhone was the much-speculated upon Apple product of the future, I took the liberty to imagine a time when the iPhone would be a legitimate mobile gaming competitor, tackling Nintendo and Sony head-on. It was a fun bit of predictification back then, but it’s science fact today. The clearest evidence yet that Nintendo’s dominance of portable gaming might be threatened is Rockstar Games’ much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, an epic, multi-hour crime game that is deeper than anything I’ve seen on the iPhone to date.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review MetaSquares, Piyo Blocks Lite, Space Dock, Sky Force, PuzzlingsXXX.

The venerable Grand Theft Auto series has been ported to almost every device in gadetry’s zoological garden, but few of the efforts were as superlative as Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS. Realizing that the first-person style of the likes of Grand Theft Auto III and IV would be ill-suited for the DS’ control scheme and modest hardware, they instead came up with an amalgam of the frenetic, top-down 2D action of Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2 combined with the story and strong characters of the latter games in the series.

The result is a masterpiece: not just one of the best games in the handheld line Grand Theft Auto games, but the series as a whole. And now it’s available over at the App Store for $9.99.

I haven’t tried the iPhone version yet, but the screenshots look remarkably more crisp and detailed than the Nintendo DS version, although it retains the latter’s attractive cel-shaded top-down perspective. A failing of the DS version was afterthought touch gimmicks, and I imagine those have been ported wholesale to the iPhone version, but overall, if Chinatown Wars for the iPhone is as good as game as its DS counterpart, this is a must buy for Apple gamers.

Since late 2008, John Kooistra has been masterminding an intergalactic war—inside your iPhone. The reds and blues have been engaged in a deadly struggle, as evidenced in twist-based shooter Blue Defense and its more involved sequel Blue Attack.

Red Conquest is John’s most advanced and innovative game yet, a complex, exciting RTS that takes full advantage of Apple’s hardware. Cult of Mac interviewed John about how he got into iPhone games development and how the latest game in the red/blue saga came to be.

Makers of quirky, charming and Mac game makers nonpareil Popcap Games are having a fantastic deal: buy a game (or, for that matter, twelve) from them and all the money will go to Haitian earthquake relief.

The deal’s good for today only, but there’s no shortage of great Popcap games to choose from, including Bejeweled 2, Bookworm, Peggle, Plants vs. Zombies and Zuma’s Revenge.

What a wonderful gesture on behalf of Popcap. Let’s hope they can translate the money from my purchase of Plants vs. Zombies into enough medical supplies to prevent some poor Haitian for becoming the latter.