Think you’ve seen the last of The Walking Dead on your Mac or iOS device? Think again.
Telltale Games, the award-winning developer of recent hit games The Walking Dead: Season One and Fables: The Wolf Among Us, announced Tuesday the coming premiere of the second season of The Walking Dead video game series for Mac, iOS, PC, and home game consoles later this year.
The Walking Dead: Season Two is available for pre-order right now from Steam and the Telltale Games Online store.
If that headline reads like the tag for a family-friendly animated film — possibly one released during the holiday season — it’s because Mimpi, an adorable platformer from developers Crescent Moon Games and Silicon Jelly, has all the charm of those movies. The good ones, I mean. The bad ones aren’t charming at all.
But a cute visual style isn’t enough, so Mimpi also has puzzles, hidden items, and items to unlock. And it all happens across eight big levels, each with their own visual and play styles.
In short, it’s a cute game and plenty of it.
There’s nothing I like better than a game that charms from the get-go, and delightfully indie Towncraft is one of those games.
Developer Flat Earth Games has created a gentle yet deep crafting game that plays as equal parts Sim City and Minecraft, with hundreds of crafting recipes, super cute music, and adorable artwork.
What’s not to like?
Board games have enjoyed quite the resurgence on the iPad, with digital versions of just about any game folks can think of, including Monopoly, Risk, Ticket To Ride, and Small World, just to name a few.
Many of these games have excellent pass and play gameplay, which lets gamers play a turn and then hand the iPad over to a friend to take their turn. What’s been missing, though, from many of these games, is real-world dice. There’s something delightful about the randomness of the analog cube, used in all kinds of board games from Backgammon to Yahtzee.
Dice+, then, aims to remedy that with a big, lovely, bluetooth-powered die, ready with its own app full of dice games that will work with the plastic die. Suffice it to say that playing a digital game with a real-world die is, simply put, sublime.
The iPad mini, announced today, is suddenly a fantastic gaming device. While the original iPad mini introduced a fantastic iPad form factor at 7.9 inches, the iPad 2-equivalent display and CPU just doesn’t quite cut it for higher-end gaming apps.
Of course, all of Apple’s iOS devices have been great for gaming ever since the App Store launched back in 2008. Games make up a huge portion of the 1,000,000 apps out there to date, and it’s not surprising anymore to see console-level gaming experiences show up on both iPad and iPhone.
Note: This article originally appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand issue, Game On!. Grab yourself a copy or subscribe today.
It still surprises me when someone says, “I don’t play video games.”
Games are a touchstone of cultural relevance these days. With the advent of the iOS platform, with its ready availability of a wide variety of video games for all types of players, it’s hard to not see their influence. Not playing video games is like not reading novels or not watching television: sure, some folks choose that, but they’re missing out on a common cultural heritage and discussion.
That said, video games can seem intimidating. Or feel like a waste of valuable productivity time. I won’t bore you with statistics and studies that say otherwise, but trust me on this: video games can be a viable leisure time activity for all of us.
So how do we get you playing games? In the case of my girlfriend, it was finding the games that made sense to her. For my dad? He still won’t play them. So this list is as much for him as it is for you. You’re welcome.
Here at Cult of Mac, we’re just starting our coverage of iOS and Mac games, as our fearless leader Leander told you in the publisher’s letter for the inaugural edition of our Newsstand magazine.
Since we’re just starting up, it’s pretty easy to get our attention when it comes to promotional emails and review requests. While we can’t review all the games we’re sent, we do read all the promotional emails that you’re sending our way.
Even still, we’d be lucky to review even a minuscule percentage of games we get requests for, so there are a few things that you can do to guarantee that we’ll take a closer look. There are a few more than you can do to make sure we don’t look much closer, too.
Here’s a list of both extremes, to help guide you on your way to getting coverage on Cult of Mac.
With this latest Halloween-flavored update, Kingdom Rush: Frontiers is bringing vampires and werewolves to its acclaimed tower defense gameplay in a new update, entitled Shadowmoon.
You’ll get three brand spankin’ new levels to defend your base against nine new enemy types, including scary vampires and vicious werewolves (oh my!). The update will go live on All Hallow’s Eve itself, so get ready for some Halloween fun after you fill your pillow cases full of loot from your local neighborhood.
Here’s the brand new trailer to whet your appetite.
Old people like me grew up with Choose Your Own Adventure books. This occasionally ridiculous series introduced an entire generation of children to both the importance of choice and the oddball nuances of second-person narrative.
Following in that tradition is the Gamebook Adventures franchise, which adds a dice-driven, role-playing-style combat system to its branching fantasy storyline. The eighth entry, Curse of the Assassin, is out now; it’s a slow-paced, text-heavy, epic beast of an experience.
So basically, it’s everything people love about those books.
There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps 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 apps on the App Store that they’re using.
This week, it’s Halloween-themed Costume Quest from Double Fine Productions. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter thinks.
If there’s one thing we all need more of, it’s Angry Birds, am I right? No?
Well, either way, it doesn’t matter: you’re getting more of them. Rovio just announced the pending release of Angry Birds: Go!, a kart racing iOS game set to go live on the App Store December 11, 2013, which is–not too coincidentally–the Finnish studio’s fourth birthday birdday.
Some games just aren’t meant for touch screens, and it’s very unfortunate that The Cave is one of them. In developer Double Fine’s dark look at inner desires and magical caves, you guide three of the seven available “heroes” through a labyrinthian network of tunnels that slowly unveil each character’s inner corruption.
Its fantastic-yet-eerie atmosphere and stellar narration definitely translates well to portable screens, but the lack of physical controls or even on-screen button prompts is a serious issue.
Note: This article originally appeared in the Newsstand magazine” target=”_blank”>Cult of Mac Newsstand issue, Game On!. Grab yourself a copy or subscribe today.
Michael Frauenhofer is an indie developer who currently lives in Pennsylvania. He and his mom made Demon Chic, a story-based, decidedly indie game available for iPad. The game focuses on three roommates trying to live life while battling monsters, giant babies, and floating heads. It’s an experience that turns the traditional idea of monster battles on its head, as the main characters all are really fighting their own inner demons.
Demon Chic is a hallucinogenic trip through the lives of three ordinary people who must learn to live with their illness, not cure it, and find some sort of fulfilling life while doing so.
This ain’t no Angry Birds sequel, folks, so buckle up.
Waking up, looking at your clock, and seeing that you’re late for work or class is one of the worst feelings in the world. In that heart-stopping instant, you feel your control over your life drop into your stomach, and all you can think about is how annoyed or mad or disappointed the people waiting on you are going to be. It’s an adrenaline-drenched nightmare of a moment in which you realize just how quickly you can put your pants on and brush your teeth, and as you bolt out the door to face your fate, you wonder why you can’t always get ready that quickly.
Gary, the hero of developer Noego’s Level 22, is caught in that situation, and the really bad news is that he’s been late to work so many times that if anyone sees him this morning, he will lose his job. So on top of the already stressful situation of being late, he has to sneak his way up to the 22nd floor without anyone seeing him.
That’s right: This is a stealth game about going to work. And it’s every bit as silly and fun as that sounds.
I can really appreciate an app that values my time, so I’m going to just throw this in here at the start: SpellGrid, an anagram/crossword game out now for iPhone and iPad, will have you playing within five seconds of opening it. That doesn’t affect my review, but I’ve seen enough startup loading screens to think this is worth mentioning.
Alright, now about the game:
In SpellGrid, you start with a word which contains no repeating letters (e.g. smelting). Then, you have a set amount of time to see how many more words you can form, crossword-style, from those letters. The amount of time depends on the length of the starting word; it can be seven, eight, or nine letters long, and you’ll have one, two, or three minutes, respectively, to play your round.
Every once in a while, an alien threat arises that is so malevolent and so heinous that the only thing to do is send a one-man ship out into space to take them all on singlehandedly.
Alright, so that’s never happened in the history of ever, but in video games, it’s been going on at least since Space Invaders in 1978. And it is in this fine tradition of lonely, foolish heroism that we have Space Qube, a new shooter for the iPhone and iPad. If you’ve played any “One ship vs. all aliens” game before, you know what to expect here: The ship goes back and forth; the aliens fly in distinct patterns and shoot at you; you pick up powerups; and every once in a while, you fight a boss.
And if that’s all it did, I would say that Space Qube is very capable and leave it at that. But it has one extra feature that makes it stand out.
Video games are all about solving problems and helping people. Sometimes, the problem is “too many monsters” and the people are the ones who made all those monsters in the first place.
So it is with Link the Slug, a puzzle game from developer OX Play, which is about a hapless scientist who accidentally creates a new species of colorful slugs and immediately decides that they must all die horribly. And that’s where you come in.
To destroy the slugs — who I will remind you have done nothing wrong — you must “link” them by tapping on two slugs of the same color. This will cause electricity to arc between the two targets, killing them both. Electricity can turn either left or right once so you want to link slugs around corners, but it can’t pass through obstacles or other slugs.
There are a bunch of apps out on iOS for kids, from educational apps to sports apps 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 apps on the App Store that they’re using.
This week, it’s tons of Disney fun with Disney Infinity: Toy Box, which is free on the app store. Here’s what our Kid APProved reporter thinks.
Brianna and Frank Wu didn’t set out to make a statement.
They just ended up creating a full-on spy-meets-spice-girls mobile game with the most distinctive look you’ve ever seen, and all the roles that matter are filled with women.
“I love the idea of powerful girls who are blowing stuff up,” says Frank Wu, “flying spaceships, diffusing bombs, and doing all the stuff that you associate with space marines, but it’s kind of irrelevant to the story that they’re girls.”
Irrelevant to the storyline, maybe, but in an entertainment media that is short on strong, normative female lead characters, upcoming iPad game Revolution 60 is a breath of fresh air.
Everyone loves feeding cute little animals, and mobile-game developers are no different. Games like Cut the Rope and Cat on a Diet are all about bringing food to adorable, tiny faces, and Drop That Candy continues the tradition.
In this colorful puzzle game, you are tasked with clearing all of the candy in a series of boxes in order to drop them into the waiting mouth of Gizmo, a woodland creature of indeterminate species. You do this by tapping on the candy, and you can clear multiple pieces of the same color with a single tap if they are touching.
It’s an odd setup, but it all adds up to a game that is equally cute, clever, and fun.
You know what people love? Cats. Just look at the Internet: It has cats everywhere.
You know what else people love? Breaking stuff. Just look at Angry Birds.
And a third thing people love? Taking two things and jamming them together. So now we have Cat on a Diet, a game about breaking stuff. Plus, it has a cat. And the cat is overweight. So that’s like a hat trick. Best game ever.
Well … it’s alright.
The endless runner genre might be in a bit of a rut. You run, run some more, kick that thing, avoid that other thing, jump over that third thing … it’s all getting a little predictable.
Luckily, we have games like Boson X to mix things up a bit. Its developer bills it as a “rotational runner,” and it takes an interesting approach to adding to the genre: subtraction. Boson X doesn’t add new features like lasers or parkour like, for example, Runbot; it’s actually very minimal. And therein lies its strength.
Have you ever realized just how much random chance is involved in your favorite video games?
Consider dashing through Diablo III dungeons, mashing buttons and watching your little avatar cut through swathes of demon enemies. Each of those hits is managed by a vast mathematical model in the background, deciding how many hit points each swing of your sword or blast of your magic will take off of each monster in your path.
Tower of Fortune 2, like it’s predecessor, seems like an indie meditation on the RPG genre itself by exposing the mechanics in the background of typical RPGs with the biggest symbol of luck ever: the slot machine.
Strata, a puzzle game by developer Graveck, has been out for a few months now, but I only recently stumbled across it. Like FlowDoku, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, it’s a deceptively clever title that uses a couple quick rules to create complex tasks for players to solve.
The rules of Strata are simple: You receive a square grid between 2×2 and 6×6 boxes in size, and you have to place colored ribbons across every row and column. Some boxes have colored squares in them, and the top ribbon on that square must be the same color. That sounds way more complicated than it is, but it makes sense once you’re looking at it.
And you should look at it because it’s really, really pretty.
Seminal 1990s tabletop role-playing game, Shadowrun, has recently come to the digital domain, originally with a version of Shadowrun Returns for the Mac, PC, and Linux platforms. Cult of Mac gave the game a stellar review, calling it a “fully realized tabletop to digital RPG conversion.” Say that five times fast.
Now the game is finally on tablets, both of the Android and iOS variety, and the buzz is that it’s a note-for-note port of the desktop game, minus the campaign editor. That’s a lot of game to smoosh into a tablet.
