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February 06 2012
Screen Shot 2012-02-05 at 7.40.02 PM
Good Old Games is running a $4.99 sale on multiple Sierra titles including Space Quest and Kings Quest. The games come in packages of three and are compatible with Windows (sorry, Mac users, but here's a consolation prize).
January 19 2012
Screen shot 2012-01-18 at 5.39.39 PM
Six months ago, Brass Monkey had built and released some well-developed software development kits (SDKs) for Android, iOS, and beyond that, simply put, enabled gamers to turn their mobile devices into remote controllers, with support for Flash, Unity3D, and desktop games and apps. The Brass Monkey team, CEO Chris Allen tells us, believed that bringing the functionality of a Wii controller to smart devices was something gamers could get excited about -- but, at the time, they were missing one important piece. Support that would allow gamers to play on the browser. So they went about acq-hiring Emotely and its Founder and CEO Francois Laberge, bringing him on as CTO.
January 01 2012
60beat iPad Gaming Accessory Could Be The iOS Missing Link
It appears the iPad gamepad of our dreams has finally arrived. The 60beat is a full-sized gamepad designed for iOS devices and it connects to iPads and iPhones via the headphone jack. While there aren’t many games that support the technology (yet), the concept is fairly simple. The controller works by sending signals through the devices’ microphone jack.
Package includes : GamePad and Audio Splitter
4 foot cable from GamePad to headphone jack
Color is white with black joysticks and buttons
Made from hard resin plastic
Because it is portable it won’t bog down your baggage like the iCade accessory and it should be trivial for games makers to add support in future titles. $50 is a little pricey, but it might mean the difference between fun and failure when it comes to run and jump classics like Mega Man on the iPad.
December 23 2011
Mobile News Feed Games
One upon a time, Facebook game companies like Zynga fattened up their user counts thanks to viral distribution to non-gamers through the news feed. Facebook later curtailed this channel, forcing developers to concentrate on paid marketing and true word of mouth to grow. A new boom period could be coming, this time for mobile developers, as Facebook announced today that it is testing game stories in the mobile news feed. This could attract devs to its recently launched HTML5 mobile gaming platform with bait of reaching hundreds of millions of daily active Facebook mobile users.
December 13 2011
full1
Do you hate your Facebook friends? Do you want to blow them all up in fiery blasts of laser light? Sure, we all do. FaceInvaders allows you to shoot down your social graph. The game is a simple Space Invaders clone with a twist - each alien is a face randomly selected from your Facebook account. You shoot down friends hither and yon, allowing you to passive-aggressively destroy the people who you pretend to love.
December 02 2011
aces-hangout
Aces Hangout is a new, in development product from the team at Hettema&Bergsten, which you may remember as the makers of the Twitter trend tracker, StrawberryJ.am. The online application brings a unique twist to online gambling, thanks to its integration with Google+'s multi-person video chat feature, Google+ Hangouts. Unlike other video poker games, where users often play as online avatars, Aces Hangout feels more like a real world card game. You can watch live video feeds of the other players in Google+'s Hangouts, allowing to you to guess at who's bluffing and who's not - something that's key to the offline poker experience.
August 01 2011
Nintendo Calling Early 3DS Buyers “Ambassadors,” Will Give Them Special Perks
While many would call buyers of the 3DS who picked up their console prior to the $80 price cut expected on August 12 “suckers,” Nintendo is calling them “Ambassadors” and they’e offering them special updates to upcoming downloadable titles. These updates will include multi-player support and improved gameplay.
While no one is quite clear on everything Ambassadors will get, Nintendo has said that early adopters will receive certain perks including updated versions of the games they downloaded after August 12. Which games? Well, in conjunction with the price cut, early adopters would get twenty free NES and GBA games, arguably cold comfort for those who would rather have four Hamiltons in their pocket.
Here’s a quote from the press release:
Once the paid versions of the games are posted to the Nintendo eShop later in the year, the updated versions will be available to Ambassadors for download at no cost.
If this sounds confusing, fear not: even IGN had no idea what was up and they’re paid to write about gaming all day long.
December 30 2010
Pew Shows 65% Of People Pay For Digital Content; Mostly Music, Software, And Mobile Apps
The Pew Internet organization put out results of a survey on how many people pay for digital content online. The study found that 65 percent of people online have paid to download some form of digital content or for a subscription to a digital media service. The survey excluded physical goods bought online and was focussed only on digital content such as music, software, news, and other online or electronic publications.
For those who do spend money online on digital media, most spend between $1 and $10 a month, with 68 percent spending less than $30 a month. (You can see the distribution of amount spend in the chart above). The two kinds of digital goods people are most willing to pay for by far are music and software. One third of respondents (33 percent) say they have paid for either digital music or software online. And 21 percent have paid for mobile apps. So if you combine mobile apps and other forms of software, that is the largest single category even accounting for overlap in the numbers. Paying for digital games comes in fourth at 19 percent.
What about digital newspapers or magazines behind paywalls or for sale for tablets like the iPad? A respectable 18 percent of respondents say they have paid for news or other reports online. That even beats out the 16 percent who have paid for movies or TV shows. Media companies will love that stat. And ebooks? Only 10 percent have bothered to pay for those.
Here is the full breakdown:
- 33% of internet users have paid for digital music online
- 33% have paid for software
- 21% have paid for apps for their cell phones or tablet computers
- 19% have paid for digital games
- 18% have paid for digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports
- 16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows
- 15% have paid for ringtones
- 12% have paid for digital photos
- 11% have paid for members-only premium content from a website that has other free material on it
- 10% have paid for e-books
- 7% have paid for podcasts
- 5% have paid for tools or materials to use in video or computer games
- 5% have paid for “cheats or codes” to help them in video games
- 5% have paid to access particular websites such as online dating sites or services
- 2% have paid for adult content
November 18 2010
The First Augmented Reality Star Wars Game, Falcon Gunner, Hits The App Store
Star Wars and video games go hand-in-hand. There is a long line of Star Wars-themed games going back to the days of arcade games, and continuing through home console and mobile games. Now, the first augmented reality Star Wars game for the iPhone just hit the app store. It is called Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner ($4.99, iTunes link).
The game starts with the scene from the original Star Wars inside the Millennium Falcon after they escape the Death Star and the TIE Fighters attack. You are Luke Skywalker in the gunner’s turret below, and you turn the iPhone to rotate around and shoot the attacking TIE Fighters while Han Solo and Princess Leah either encourage or heckle you depending on your skills. (“Let me guess, you are trying not to hit anyone.”) In the 360-degree background is the Death Star and an earth-like planet, which come into view depending on which way you turn. The game is completely immersive, and works especially well while sitting in a swivel office chair.
The game also has an augmented reality mode which replaces the computer graphics background with your camera view. So you can play in your room or outdoors and the spaceships look like they are coming in from the distance. (see video below, which was taken from the Empire State Building). Be careful doing this in public, otherwise you might become that guy depicted in this other promo video showing what you might look like if you play the game in public. The augmented reality mode is fun to show people, but for pure gameplay I prefer the full-graphics mode. I’ve been playing a pre-release version of the game for a few days. I am not a game guy, but there is a real Wow factor here.
Falcon Gunner is licensed from Lucasfilm and published by THQ Wireless, but it was designed and developed by Vertigore Games, a startup incubated at Futurity Ventures. “It is like bringing Star Wars into your world, which is what a lot of people want to do,” says Edo Segal, the CEO of Futurity. The game is built on top of Vertigore’s immersive game engine, which was also used to build a previous game called Pacific Defense. “We pulled it the second we got the Star Wars license,” says Segal of Pacific Defense. He and CEO Josh Shabtai wanted to put all of Vertigore’s efforts into the Star Wars game instead. “Having a branded property in a world of 500,000 apps is worth more than however creative we could have become,” says Segal.
Star Wars Arcade is not a two or three-man effort. It took about 30 people, many of them contractors, to build the game. The total development budget ran into six figures. That is a lot for an iPhone game. “We are getting to this inflection point where you can put production values into an iPhone game,” says Segal. The entire game was written in C from the ground up, with the 3D models designed specifically with the retina display of the iPhone 4 in mind. Obviously, the game really needs to be a hit for all that expense and effort to pay off, but it could also set a new benchmark for games on the iPhone platform.
An iPad version will come out soon, and more Star Wars-themed games are in the planning stages (hence, the “Arcade” in the name), which will tie together different immersive adventures across the Star Wars universe. Vertigore is also creating immersive iPhone games for Hasbro’s upcoming 3D View-Master.
Up until now augmented reality apps have been nothing more than cool gimmicks. Vertigore wants to popularize 3D-immersive technology by taking it mainstream. Segal sees two approaches: you can go for complex augemenetd reality tricks, or just make it fun to shoot things. He is taking the latter apparaoch
August 07 2010
The 30 Best iPhone Apps So Far This Year
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Alex Ahlund, the former CEO and founder of AppVee and AndroidApps, which were acquired by mobile application directory Appolicious. About this time last year, he gave us his picks of the best iPhone apps of 2009 up until then, so we thought we’d make it an annual tradition.
I’ve been involved in the iPhone app industry since it first began in 2008 and I have to say that it has come a long way. I’ve seen it grow from a meager launch of 500 applications in the App Store to currently over 225,000. In only two years, the industry has matured at hyperspeed. It spawned an entire ecosystem to support it from a multitude of news and editorial resources to developer engines, promotional services and ancillary niches. With over five billion app downloads and a billion dollars at stake, it’s no surprise that the app economy expanded so quickly.
However, the novelty land grab is definitely over. When you run a search on the App Store, most of the gimmicks have already been created—at least twice. Clones still litter the store and it’s becoming even more difficult for quality apps to get noticed. But, if you have a bit of patience and are willing to sift through less exciting apps, there are some fantastic gems just waiting to be discovered.
So without further ado, here are my top 30 picks for applications released this year thus far. Try one or try them all.
Games:
1. Angry Birds (review, iTunes)
Launch birds from a slingshot to topple buildings and crush piggies. There’s a reason this game has been No. 1 on the Paid List for so long. Addictive only starts to explain it.
2. Plants Vs Zombies (review, iTunes)
A defense game by casual game creators PopCap. Protect your home from an invasion of zombies by placing plants that shoot, freeze, blow-up, crush, or generally obliterate your foes.
3. Fruit Ninja (review, iTunes)
So simple, but strangely satisfying. Swipe to slice 3D fruit as it enters your screen. Great visuals and gratifying delivery.
One of the best 3D arena shooters for the iPhone. Smooth multiplayer and easy handling. If you’re going to play a first-person shooter on the go, this is the one.
5. Rhythm Spirit (review, iTunes)
A rhythm-fighting game based on Japanese folklore. Very unique with top-notch production values. Can’t go wrong with ninjas, fighting, and music.
6. Ragdoll Blaster 2 (review, iTunes)
Sequel to the fun and creative physics game. Blast ragdolls out of your canon to hit various targets. Tons of levels and really interesting puzzles.
The iPhone version of the popular flash game. Original escape game where you run away from impending doom, dodging obstacles and crashing through windows.
8. Chaos Rings (review, iTunes)
One of the few games priced above $10 that sold really well. A deep RPG with fantastic graphics from Square Enix.
9. The Horrible Vikings (review, iTunes)
A trajectory game steeped in style. Launch your vikings to hit enemies and items alike. A full upgrade system and use of power-ups adds nice depth.
Fun side-scrolling strategy game where you employ the use of soldiers, machine guns, rifles and bombs to destroy your enemy.
11. God Finger (review, iTunes)
Keep your followers healthy and working. Create buildings, farms, and taverns for your peasants to enjoy. Control the weather and become the dictator of your own little world.
12. Parachute Ninja (review, iTunes)
Fling your ninja ball through the air in this interesting platformer. Reach higher and higher platforms, while avoiding obstacles and enemies.
13. Pocket Legends (review, iTunes)
This MMORPG deserves attention for an ambitious endeavor. Choose a class and work on leveling up, meeting strangers, and battling enemies.
14. Monkey Island 2 (review, iTunes)
Sequel to one of the best adventure games ever released. More humor, puzzles, and story that we’ve come to expect from this classic series.
15. Zenonia 2 (review, iTunes)
Followup to the hit action RPG Zenonia. With more playable classes, abilities, items, story and artwork, this is a must-have for RPG fans.
Apps:
16. Foursquare (review, iTunes)
The quintessential geo-social app, Foursquare allows users to ‘Check in’ to locations to earn points and broadcast their location. Get more Check-Ins than anyone and you become the mayor.
Groupon is a service that offers an extremely marked down deal every day. From restaurants to spas, users have been excited about Groupon since it came out. All the same convenience on your iPhone.
It made sense for Apple to bring their casual video editing software over to the iPhone when the 4 launched with hi-def recording. Very solid tool for on-the-go editing.
19. Siri Assistant (review, iTunes)
Your own personal assistant. Ask it for directions. Reminders. General information. Nearly anything. Fun and useful for anyone on the go. (Bought by Apple).
While nothing new, with the acquisition of Tweetie, the official Twitter has become the best out of them all. Contains all the features you need.
After dropping dramatically from the $50 price tag, Wolfram has become a fantastic knowledge searching tool based on Wolfram Alpha.
I know, I know. This is a given. Provided with iOS 4.0, iBooks is the defacto book reader. Even so, it’s worth a mention for how elegant and easy it is to use compared to other readers.
23. Hulu Plus (review, iTunes)
This is something we have been waiting for a while. The downside is that it only offers content for the paid service—not for free as it is on the web. But, if you can pony up the monthly fee, this is a great app.
Similar to Foursquare, Gowalla allows users to ‘check in’ to a location to earn stamps. Based on GPS, it’s very addictive earning stamps and a great companion while you are out and about.
25. Dragon Dictation (review, iTunes)
Finally, an accurate way to dictate voice to text on the iPhone. Speak naturally to send a text message, email, or anything else that can receive inputted text.
26. Free App A Day (review, iTunes)
FAAD is an interesting service that works with developers to offer up their paid apps for free for a short time period. If you follow the iPhone app, you can snatch up some big name apps, gratis.
27. JotNot Scanner Pro (review, iTunes)
Make your iPhone into a multi-page scanner. Has a great image enhancing ability and makes saving and sending scans pretty effortless.
28. Text’nDrive (review, iTunes)
For those of us with a habit of checking (or even worse, responding to) email while we drive, this app provides a hands-free solution where new messages are read to you and you can respond by voice.
An elegant “Around Me” style app showing everything that is near your location. Fun way to discover things you didn’t know existed.
Digg finally made an official app and it definitely didn’t disappoint. Users can look forward to all the same functionality as the native site, as well as easy saving and sharing.
Which apps would make your top 30 list?
Photo credit: Flickr/Amit Khanna
July 20 2010
A Facebook Game With a Mission: Waste Management to Launch Oceanopolis
Waste Management and its subsidiary Greenopolis are diving into social gaming with a new Facebook app called Oceanopolis. The game will launch in beta, with a full rollout expected in the coming weeks.
In the game, players maintain their own island by recycling trash to build a sustainable community and interacting with friends. Points earned virtually turn into printable coupons that can be used at movie theaters, restaurants and stores. Alternatively, they can be turned into cash donations. Points can also be earned in real life through recycling or through blogging on Greenopolis‘ site.
When Greenopolis, a environmentally themed social networking site and blogging community launched two years ago, Michael Arrington wrote that it would be better suited as a Facebook application. Oceanopolis seems to fit that bill.
According to the site, Greenopolis members have earned 6.7 million rewards and the physical recycling kiosks have recovered 3.5 million bottles, cans and other items thus far.
Greenopolis and Oceanopolis Creative Director Anthony Zolezzi said the reason for creating Oceanopolis was to virtually engage consumers. “It’s critically important that large companies get involved in the solution,” he added. “One thing Waste Management does is lets Greenopolis operate independently as part of a solution.” Waste Management is the largest recycler in North America.
Oceanopolis is kicking off its beta launch with a fundraiser for Ocean Aid, which will hold an annual concert to fund research on pollution-filled ocean gyres. Greenopolis will donate a dollar on behalf of anyone who tweets: “Make waves. Fight ocean pollution with http://apps.Facebook.com/Oceanopolis #Oceanopolis.”
It remains to be seen whether recycling on a virtual island can inspire real-life recycling, and whether Oceanopolis will be able to gain a significant user base. At the very least, Oceanopolis could be an addictive game to feel good instead of guilty about playing.
March 26 2010
After news of the HD and XL iPad versions of some of our favorite games are on their way - Flight Control being one of my personal obsessions - we thought it would be fun to ponder what other boardgames would make for a fun iPad experience. Here's our list. What would you guys like to see?
February 25 2010
When It Comes To iPhone Games, What Sells Is Action, Adventure, and Arcade
At recent the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, mobile app analytics startup Distimo gave a presentation with some other interesting comparisons, such the relative size of the iPhone App Store (150,000 total apps at the time) compared to the Android Market (20,000) and Blackberry (5,000) others.
It showed that in January alone, the Apple App store grew by 13,865 apps versus 3,005 new Android apps, 734 new Nokia Ovia apps, and 501 new Blackberry apps. Android was the fastest growing App store and the Android market has more free apps (57 percent) than Apple (25%) or any other mobile app store (full slide deck embedded below).
By far the most popular category in the iPhone app store is games. Distimo reported that 58 percent of all apps in the App Store are games. And in a new report that just came out today (download it here), Distimo breaks down the game apps further by price, category, and which ones sell the most.
While the biggest category is Puzzles (15 percent), Action and Arcade both come in second with 11 percent each. The average price of a paid game in Apple’s App Store is $2.24, much cheaper than Blackberry games ($4.60) or Windows Mobile games ($4.90), and a little bit above Android games (2.08).
Breaking down further by category in the Apple App store, the most expensive games are in the Role Playing category, with an average price of $7.96. Action and Arcade games are cheaper with average prices of $1.68 and $1.39 respectively. Adventure games are in the middle with an average price of $4.43.
But when you look the top grossing games, 22 percent are in the Action category, 12 percent are in Arcade, and 9 percent are Adventure. Those are the top three grossing categories. Only 5 percent of the top grossing games are role playing games. (Click on charts at right to enlarge).
So the top-grossing games are not necessarily the ones with the highest price points, especially as game developers switch to free or 99-cent games with in-app purchases. According to Distimo, Tap Tap Revenge 3, which became free and upsells songs via in-app purchases grossed more in January than the FIFA 2010 soccer game, which sells for $6.99. Quality games can still command higher prices, but getting players to pay more over time seems to be the strategy many top mobile game developers are pursuing.
January 29 2010
Every so often you find a game so addicting that you can't stop playing it. I'm that way with two games on the iPhone: Fieldrunners and Civ Revolution. Close runners up are iShoot (there are only so many times you can launch nukes) and now Crush the Castle. Designed by Armor Games, CtC was originally a Flash game ported to the iPhone. To play you load up a trebuchet with weapons (rocks, firebombs, whatever else) by tapping once. You tap again launch and then tap to release at some point in the arc. The items swing out into space and land at some point on a castle that is essentially made of beams. The beams react in a naturalistic way meaning they move as if they were real beams and you then crush little people underneath them. Rinse. Repeat.
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