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In a world of ever-increasing video game complexity, some games stand out as being ones that can captivate despite high-def graphics and intense gameplay. It’s certainly not easy, of course, and the ones that try have their work cut out for them.
After becoming addicted to Thumb.Run over the past week, the speedy racing game has caught my eye as a fulfillment of what’s mentioned above.
Andrew Webster, writing on the upcoming game by my friend Sam Rosenthal, who’s collaborating with Ryan Cash and Snowman (makers of Alto’s Adventure):
When he was still a student at the University of Southern California, Sam Rosenthal started working on a game about building a house of cards. It was inspired in part by the Radiohead song “House of Cards,” which Rosenthal felt sounded “like a gentle plea to knock down a structure in favor of something new.” The game let you create structures, then break them down so that you could rebuild them in different ways. Rosenthal wanted the deconstruction and reconstruction to gradually tell a coming of age story about the wistfulness of adolescence, and the way important, sometimes devastating events can impact your life. “The longer the idea sat with me,” he says, “the more it became a lens that I use to see the world.”
After graduation, he worked various industry jobs, designing puzzles for Disney’s mobile hit Where’s My Water? and characters for Activision’s ubiquitous Skylanders series. The idea from school stuck with him, and in his spare time, he continued to tinker with it. A few years later, in 2013, Rosenthal met up with budding game designer Ryan Cash, and the two shared the projects they were working on. Cash had an early version of a snowboarding game, which would go on to become mobile hit Alto’s Adventure. Rosenthal revealed an early version of Where Cards Fall.
No gameplay images or videos yet, but I can already tell this will be worth paying attention to.
Owen S. Good, writing for Polygon:
An iOS version of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth was rejected by Apple on grounds it depicts violence toward children, the game’s publisher said Saturday evening.
Tyrone Rodriguez, the founder of Nicalis and a producer and developer for the game, tweeted this image of Apple’s rejection notice, which notes that “Your app contains content or features that depict violence towards, or abuse of, children, which is not allowed on the App.”
You know your App Review has a problem when even Nintendo has accepted the same game a year ago. This wouldn’t be the first time Apple’s App Review team has shown less respect for mature themes expressed through videogames (the same themes being generally okay for other types of entertainment) and I hope this rejection gets reversed. The Binding of Isaac is a fantastic game and Apple should be thrilled to have these kinds of indie titles on the App Store.
I ride the train into Chicago every weekday. Most days, you can find me listening to one of my favorite podcasts, or getting some work done while I listen to music, but other times, I just want to enjoy a good game. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been playing a wonderful game called A Good Snowman is Hard to Build that is trivial to learn, but full of challenging puzzles, and tremendously charming.
A must-read guide by Andrew Cunningham if you’ve considered emulating classic games (for me, that means SNES, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance) on a new Apple TV:
Right now there are two notable emulation projects targeting tvOS. One is a distant relative of the MAME arcade emulator, though it doesn’t seem as though it’s being maintained. Another, Provenance, is the one we’ll be spending the most time with. It’s a multi-system emulator that supports most major 8- and 16-bit consoles, including the NES, SNES, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance.
That’s basically it for now, but more consoles could show up in the future. Provenance is already heavily based on open source code from OpenEmu and other projects, so anyone with a little patience could port other emulators without much extra work.
That’s my kind of holiday side-project, too.
Fantastic update to my favorite videogame emulator for OS X: OpenEmu 2.0 has brought support for new systems, better integration for SteelSeries controllers (I have one for my Apple TV), a modernized interface, and even a way to organize screenshots and save states. The highlights: support for PlayStation, PSP, and Nintendo 64 games, plus real-time gameplay rewinding.
How I wish this was around ten years ago, when I was really into emulation on my PSP (which I still keep around, running homebrew software). If you haven’t tried OpenEmu in a while, now’s a good time to play with it again.
I found this game yesterday via 9to5Mac – developed by Asaf Avidan Antonir, Steady Square is a simple game where you have to keep a square steady and let it pass through openings in a series of walls. The twist: on the iPhone 6s, the game is controlled through 3D Touch.
Steady Square is extremely basic: there’s no sound, no items to unlock, no menus – it’s more of a proof of concept, really. But, there’s something compelling about the simplicity and silence of Steady Square and I find it to be somewhat relaxing. The collisions are unforgiving (it’s reminiscent of Flappy Bird in this sense) and 3D Touch adds an interesting dimension to an otherwise unsurprising mechanic. It’s free on the App Store.
Also, Steady Square’s developer found a way to bypass Apple’s rules for scale apps based on 3D Touch. He explains how you can calculate the weight of objects with his game in a video.
Kevin MacLeod has been doing good work with AfterPad – unlike most gaming blogs, AfterPad is “dedicated to hardcore and indie gaming on iOS, with a special focus on cutting-edge technologies like MFi game controllers, AirPlay, and Metal”. I’ve found myself checking out AfterPad on a daily basis, and Kevin’s knowledge on MFi controllers has come in handy when buying games for the new Apple TV.
In addition to the blog, Kevin maintains a list of MFi controller compatible games. This is the kind of curation you don’t even get from Apple on the App Store: games are organized by date, categories, collections, and you can also browse Editor’s Choice picks and Kevin’s reviews for selected games.
Great work, and one of my new favorite websites.
