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Posts tagged with "games"

Borderlands: Game Of The Year Edition for Mac Available→

Borderlands: Game Of The Year Edition for Mac Available

Bloodthirsty bandits. Vicious monsters. Tons of loot. Lock, Load and face the madness. Gearbox Software’s acclaimed sci-fi hit comes to the Mac complete with all four expansion packs. Borderlands is a unique hybrid of first person shooter and role-playing game with a super sharp visual style and a compelling 4 player co-op mode.

The game is out on Amazon now, or you can buy it on Feral Interactive’s website. I played this on a PC months ago, it’s a real gem.

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There’s A New Minecraft Clone In The App Store

Fans of popular indie sandbox game for Mac and PC Minecraft have been asking for a native iOS porting for months now. While it looks like they won’t be getting an official iPhone or iPad version anytime soon, clones approved by Apple are here to help.

After a brief appearance of “Minecrafted for iPhone” two weeks ago, there’s a new app in the App Store called “Eden - World Builder” which looks and behaves a lot like the original Minecraft. The app is available now here, and it’s priced at $4.99. Although the app’s name doesn’t carry the Minecraft brand, the description on iTunes says:

Explore a vast pristine world of infinite possibility. Build your own personal Eden. Eden brings the creative block building genre, pioneered by games like Minecraft, Infiniminer, and Blockland, to the touch screen.

Whatever. From what I can see in the app, though, looks like you can break any block with 1 hit, and I haven’t seen monsters around. Perhaps I just need to play more.

Anyway, grab the app before Apple pulls it, it’s available here.

Angry Birds Seasons Now Available→

Angry Birds Seasons Goes Now Available

From now on, every season is an Angry Birds season. After the special treats of Halloween, Angry Birds Seasons returns with another gift that keeps on giving: Season’s Greetings for the Holidays!

Seasonal theme, “25 days of Angry Birds” until Christmas, Game Center support, new achievements. 99 cents in the App Store. Looks like a nice update.

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John Carmack On iOS Performances→

John Carmack On iOS Performances

From Ars Technica’s interview with John Carmack:

Whether the iOS devices will reach that same level of performance before the next console generation ships is quite an interesting question. There are some very different designs for power consumption considerations that go into their hardware design, and cranking things up to give that level of power but gets burning hot in your hands and uses up the battery in 30 minutes is absolutely possible with the form factor right now, but it’s probably not the right decision from the standpoint of what the device really is and is supposed to be. But even at the same power draw, they’re going to be doubling and doubling again the performance level.

In the not-too-distant future, we’re going to be seeing multicore on mobiles, and I’m very interested in when the transition to 64-bit addresses is going to come in the mobile space.

If there’s one thing that’s holding developers from creating full-featured game experiences on iOS, that would be battery life.

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Soon, You’ll Be Able To Control Chopper 2 for Mac With Your iPhone

A few weeks ago we saw the first screenshots of the next version of The Incident, which will allow you to mirror the game on your TV and control it with your iPhone. Admittedly, the iPhone can serve as a great “external” controller, even better than when you’re using it to control and play at the same time because you don’t have the actual game covered by your fingers. With a small multi-touch surface in your hands, the possibilities for TV gaming are endless.

The next version of Chopper for Mac, Chopper 2, will allow for a similar setup, although the TV isn’t involved this time. Instead, Chopper 2 will let you pair your iPhone with your Mac and control the game on your computer using the accelerometer and multi-touch technology on your iPhone. The demo video below gives you a brief preview of what’s coming, and it’ll be interesting to see whether Mac games that will be published in the Mac App Store will take advantage of this pairing technology or not.

What’s for sure is, the iPhone can be a great game controller. Read more

MacStories Weekly Game: ChuChu Rocket! HD

I never had the chance to play the original ChuChu Rocket! 10 years ago on the SEGA Dreamcast. I didn’t have a Dreamcast back then. In fact, I think I was playing with the PSX back in 2000, and I’m sure I had a Game Boy Color. A few years later I bought the GBA, a Game Cube and a PS2 – but I never bothered grabbing a Dreamcast to check out the gems released by SEGA and other 3rd party developers. I regret that, mostly because I’m still lacking knowledge in true masterpieces such as Shenmue (although this one’s been re-released on the Xbox) or Jet Set Radio.

Luckily enough for me, looks like iOS devices are somehow here to save the day and allow us to re-enjoy games first appeared years ago and now ready to come to life again under the power of multi-touch. That’s exactly what’s happening with ChuChu Rocket! HD for iPad: released a decade ago and subsequently redesigned to appear on the Game Boy Advance, the game’s now running on the iPad taking advantage of its larger screen and touch controls.

So why is this a Weekly Game anyway? Because it’s as genius as it was 10 years ago, and it’s a truly addictive puzzle game. Read more

Just Ahead Of Thanksgiving, Games Take Over The App Store

Frankly, I saw this coming: with all the offers and deals that have started to pop up in the App Store since last week, the rapid arise of games in the App Store charts doesn’t come as a surprise at all. Still, the results and numbers are noteworthy: while counting all the games in the App Store is nearly impossible (at least basing on official data, which Apple doesn’t provide), we can simply take a look at the “Top Paid Apps” and “Top Grossing Apps” charts to see what happened.

Games are dominating the Thanksgiving week in the App Store. Especially on the iPhone App Store, where at the moment of writing this only 26 apps out of the top 100 are non-games apps. The fact that we refer to them as “non-games apps” also tells a lot about the environment Apple created. The situation is slightly different on the iPad App Store (“only” 40,000 apps, newer platform) but the trend is just about the same on both the stores. Games are selling like hotcakes, huge discounts or not. Read more

GTA Trilogy for Mac Now Available

So you’re downloading iOS 4.2.1 for your iPad and the Apple TV is waiting an iOS 4.2 as well, but what about the Mac today? Well, there’s no software update in sight, but at least you can give it some Grand Theft Auto love.

As we previously reported, today Rockstar released GTA Trilogy for Mac, a package that contains the original GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas – all capable of running natively on your Mac. Read more

John Carmack on RAGE, Technical Limitations, Design Choices→

John Carmack on RAGE, Technical Limitations, Design Choices

John openly admits that they’re still experimenting with the App Store. So far Rage has been very successful in the few days it has been out, but they’re still waiting to see the long-term results of a shorter, lower-priced game. He explained that it’s still a point of discussion at Id as to whether the next games are going to be bigger and higher priced, or smaller and lower priced like RAGE.

If this is just an experiment, both from a pricing and technical standpoint, then I wonder what we’ll be able to play on a 3.5-inch screen in 2 years. The iOS gaming scene couldn’t be more promising.

In case you missed the whole story: Rage HD is available at $1.99 in the App Store, and it’s mind-blowing.

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