Mac games - page 6

If you’ve been anxiously awaiting your turn to play Hearthstone, the new free-to-play digital card game from World of Warcraft developer Blizzard, now’s your chance. The fast-paced strategy game plays like a simplified yet strategically challenging Magic: The Gathering, and it’s available for your Mac immediately.

The game is free to download from the Hearthstone website, and will install easily and quickly to your Mac.

Once downloaded, you’ll hop in-game for a quick couple of tutorials, and then you can either play AI opponents to hone your skills and learn the various hero classes, or you can jump right in to playing other human beings via Blizzard’s Battle.net game matching service, one of the most robust around.

I’m a sucker for MMOs, and a huge fan of the Star Trek franchise. If you like both, you might want to know that a fantastic combination of these two great things is ready to play on your Macintosh.

Now you can get your Federation thrills on in Cryptic Studios’ Star Trek Online MMO. First launched for PC only in 2010, the game is now available as a free-to-play download on your Mac, letting the rest of us play this thrilling extension to the Roddenberry-created universe that first graced television sets back in the 1960s.

“Star Trek fans have been asking for Star Trek Online on Mac since we launched in 2010. Thanks to the tremendous success we’ve had with the game, we’re excited to be expanding the galaxy again.” said Cryptic Studios’ Stephen D’Angelo. “We know there’s a large gaming community that thrives on Mac and we’re thrilled to finally be able to let them experience Star Trek Online. It simply looks amazing on Mac widescreens.”

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified gets three new expansion packs for the Mac version of the game this week, available on the Mac App Store and Steam. The new packs–Hangar 6 R&D, CodeBreakers and the Light Plasma Pistol–bring new content and missions to the strategy title as in-app purchases.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is a tactical third-person shooter game set in the exciting XCOM universe, this time in the 1960s. You play as agent William Carter, helping your agency cover up and battle alien incursions on the planet.

One of our favorite games, FTL, is getting a massive update, plus an iPad version. That’s pretty darn exciting.

The update includes new advanced weaponry, new systems and subsystems, new drones and equipment, new music, and new story content. Best of all, it’s going to be a free update. In a tweet earlier today, the FTL team updated fans on what’s new, including new features like the clone bay, mind control, and hacking systems. The iPad version will include all of these things, too, in a game that will now be called FTL: Advanced Edition.

Wondering what we've been up to? Check out our new post detailing some of the features of FTL: AE – https://t.co/9HAsO2ELcA

— FTL (@FTLgame) February 17, 2014

Check out the video below for some sweet visuals and auditory goodness.

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.

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.”

If you’ve never given the classic Fallout games a try, now’s your chance. GoG.com is giving three of them away for free for 48 hours, as part of the classic games digital distributor’s Winter Sale for 2013.

You can get the Mac version of Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics for free until Friday, December 12, so get on it now.

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.

Yes, Kickstarter projects are still a dime a dozen, but this game is worth your attention.

It’s Sentris, a music-creation tool that masquerades as a puzzle game. Want to play a music or rhythm game without having to figure out how to hold a plastic guitar? Sentris is the game for you.

We saw Sentris last month at the 2013 Seattle Indies eXpo (SIX3), which was co-located with the Penny Arcade Expo in downtown Seattle.

Developer Samantha Kalman hopes to release a full game–she’s only put together a stunning prototype at this point–and she’s taken time to explain why in the video below.

Pixowl’s pixel art game, The Sandbox, has won a bevy of awards from Apple since its introduction in the App Store in May of 2012, and garnered 6.8 million downloads across iOS and Android. Apple has featured the game with three titles, Best of World-Building Games, Best of Games 2012: Hidden Gems, and Top Games – If You Like Minecraft.

The release onto Mac brings this fantastic, engrossing game to the mouse and keyboard set, guaranteeing a good time on a bigger screen. Just like the mobile version, you’ll learn the tools available to you to mix, match, and create all sorts of things. Then you’ll share them with the world via The Sandbox’s own online Gallery, which you can browse for inspiration. It’s amazing what folks can do with this little game.

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.

In case you’re not from around here, you should know that I’m a huge fan of Scottish game developer Lucky Frame, what with their weird, wonderful visual and musical sensibilities that result in games like Pugs Luv Beats and Gentlemen!, a Victorian-themed Joust-like game.

They’ve just announced that one of their most award-winning games, Bad Hotel, is coming to the Mac and I, for one, couldn’t be more excited.

Hidden object games don’t usually catch my fancy, to be honest. I’ve never been a big fan of the mechanics, which typically require you to find objects to then reveal other objects, which can then be combined to become actual useful objects. I’ve also never been too taken by the typical romanticized story lines, either.

Big Fish’s new game, developed by India-based IronCode Games, Pahelika Secret Legends has found a way to convince me otherwise,t hough, and I find myself being drawn back to playing it often. There’s a fairly interesting story, and the puzzles are tough enough to provide a challenge without busting a brain.

If you’re like me and have been ambivalent about trying a game like this out, perhaps this is the one to start with.

Copenhagen-based games studio Full Control announced Monday a new, free, three mission campaign for its strategy game, Space Hulk, available for Mac and PC since last August.

The turn-based Space Hulk, set in the Warhammer 40,000 sci-fi universe, is a re-creation of Games Workshop’s original two-player Space Hulk board game, itself released in 1989. The new digital version is similar in many ways to the board game, with two-player tactical claustrophobia as a main focus.

The launch of the digital game was a bit rough, however, with lots of bugs and room for improvement. So the team decided to improve the game, squash the bugs, and–as a big “thank you” for the patience of its fans–has released a new three-mission campaign for free.

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.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – As I sit here on the 10th floor of Seattle’s public library, I’m trying to make some sense of the last four days of gaming conference, the Penny Arcade Expo.

It’s not like gaming is as important as, say, the current crisis in Syria, or attempts to fight poverty and homelessness, or even the inability of spaces like PAX to provide a safe place for women or people who are trangendered.

On the other hand, gaming is a massive cultural phenomenon. PAX’s founders, webcomic writers Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, wanted to create a convention that would focus on gamers, whether they play tabletop games, video games, or card games. That there is a massive interest in this convergence of different kinds of gamers, from D&D nerds to arcade geeks, is an understatement, as evidenced by quickly sold-out tickets months in advance of the conference as well as by the huge herds of human beings of all stripe who I saw traipsing from one booth to another this weekend in the Washington State Convention Center.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – Picture this: you pull out that old Dance Dance Revolution pad, connect it to your Mac, and then dance your way through procedurally generated dungeons, tapping your feet and bouncing to the beat as you kill monsters, loot chests, and equip yourself with ever more powerful weapons.

Wait, what?

Vancouver-based Brace Yourself Games (aka Ryan Clark) has perhaps stumped even the most open minded among us with this new combination, found in upcoming game, Crypt of the NecroDancer.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – Robot Loves Kitty is a husband and wife game development team who used to live in a treehouse to save money. They started a Kickstarter hoping to raise just enough money to buy a decent laptop and a copy of Unity to develop the game. They ultimately raised 650 percent of their initial request, making things easier, yet much more complex, than they’d ever planned.

“I can’t believe it’s so popular,” said Alix Stolzer, the wife half of the Robot Loves Kitty development team. She also does some of the artwork, the story, and does PR for the game. The extra funding enabled the team to rent a tiny apartment and pay for internet, but it also requires them to create more features than they initially planned.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – We spoke with Josh Glazer, CTO of Naked Sky Entertainment, about the company’s upcoming turn-based tactical game, Backyard Battles. The game, coming to iOS, Android, and the web later this year, pits two teams of children against each other, wielding cardboard tubes, spell books, and their imaginations.

“It’s what kids raised on video games do when they play outside,” said Glazer.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – Phobic Studios, the developers behind hit iOS game, Dragonvale, showed off their latest creation, Glare, at the Penny Arcade Expo this weekend in Seattle.

The game is made in Unity, which will let the studio release on Mac, PC, and Linux at first, with some vague plans for mobile spin off titles in the future. It’s looking pretty delightful, with gorgeously rendered, faux-2D backgrounds and plenty of lighting and particle effects. That sounds pretty dry on paper, but it produces a lovely effect while playing. Here’s a quick video of the gameplay we saw in the closed-door meeting.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – We got to spend some time with Ben, one of the lead designers on the free-to-play multiplayer battle arena (MOBA) game, Smashmuck Champions, currently display here in Seattle at Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) 2013. Ben showed us how quickly a match can start and conclude, a far cry from the more typical 30 minutes to an hour of a MOBA like League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients. The match Ben played in while he talked to us was all of ten minutes or so, full of frenetic battle action with fun characters, called champions, jumping around and duking it out across the battle arena.

Here’s the closed beta announcement trailer, though Ben let us know that there should be early access on Steam next week on September 6th. You can see plenty of gameplay in the video below.

The Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX, for the initiated, is an annual gaming conference held in Seattle. It was created in 2004 by the authors of the Penny Arcade webcomic, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, who wanted to go to a gaming show that focused on their own passions: console games, computer games, and tabletop games.

PAX got big, fast. Billed as a celebration of gamer culture, PAX, and spin-off conference PAX East, is more of a giant nerd gathering, contrasting nicely with the hard-pounding media-fest of the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) or the academic and developer focus of the Games Developer Conference (GDC). PAX is for gamers, by gamers, of all stripe and affiliation.

Lucky Frame’s fantastic iPad and Android game, Gentlemen!, is now available on the Mac App Store, bringing the delightful Victorian-themed dueling game to the big screen for the first time.

We reviewed the game favorably when it released on iPad, enjoying the frenetic gameplay and the whimsical art style. It’s still a go-to app when we’re looking for something to play with a friend on the same iPad.

Now that it’s on Mac, though, we can now go head to head with up to four friends via local multiplayer, flipping and leaping and, well, stabbing our buddies with glee.

Gone Home, developed by The Fullbright Company, is a newly released indie adventure game that’s getting quite a bit of buzz across the interwebs. Here’s the setup.

It’s June 7th, 1995. 1:15 AM

You arrive home after a year abroad. You expect your family to greet you, but the house is empty. Something’s not right. Where is everyone? And what’s happened here?

How do you not want this game? Even better? It’s on sale right now through the 21st of August for $17.99 on Steam.

This highly anticipated game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe is now available on Mac and PC via Steam. The digital game is based on the popular two-player board game of the same name from Games Workshop, originally published in 1989.

The current digital iteration will feature a single player campaign of 15 missions, each set on the giant derelict spaceship (the “hulk” of the title), “Sin of Damnation.” There will also be multiplayer head-to-head action, oh yes.