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Posts tagged with "games"

Grand Theft Auto III Coming To iOS→

Grand Theft Auto III Coming To iOS

Rockstar Games has announced that they’ll be porting Grand Theft Auto III to iOS and Android devices “later this fall” to commemorate the game’s tenth anniversary.

10 years ago, this month, the revolutionary open-world epic Grand Theft Auto III was released to the world – a game that set players loose as a small-time criminal at the bottom of the food chain in Liberty City, a sprawling metropolis where anything can happen – and probably will. To commemorate the game’s 10th anniversary, we’re proud to announce that Grand Theft Auto III will be coming to select new generation iOS and Android devices later this fall.

Ten years ago, I remember sitting in my friend’s room, watching him play GTA III on his PlayStation 2. Back then, the technology behind the game looked amazing: great graphics, a seemingly “open” environment and a “mature” plot gave us the illusion that we were really controlling the game’s world. Looking back, it’s easy to spot the tricks Rockstar pulled to let gamers think they were in control, and it’s interesting to consider how the GTA series evolved as hardware became more powerful and allowed for “real” decisions to take in-game. More importantly, a game like GTA III doesn’t look as impressive today as it did 10 years ago, so I guess Rockstar is betting on the “nostalgia effect” as it’s recently done on the Mac as well.

GTA III will be available for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. No word on whether the game’s graphics will be upgraded for the A5 processor and how controls will be ported to multitouch; Rockstar also says more devices will be announced soon, so keep an eye on their blog if you own an iPad 1 or iPhone 4. [via]

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FIFA 2012 Comes To The Mac→

FIFA 2012 Comes To The Mac

Electronic Arts and TransGaming have announced the release of FIFA Soccer 12 for the Mac, The Loop reports. This is the first time the popular soccer franchise is available on the Mac platform, and as usual with TransGaming’s OS X release, the port has been done using the Cider translation engine. Cider has been used in the past years in several Mac games including the recently re-released GTA series.

FIFA 2012 comes with important changes in the physics and artificial intelligence engines:

Chosen Best Sports Game by E3 Game Critics, FIFA Soccer 12 brings to the pitch the game-changing new Player Impact Engine, a physics engine built to deliver real-world physicality in every interaction on the pitch. Revolutionary gameplay innovations inspired by the real-world game make FIFA Soccer 12 deeper and more engaging. All-new Precision Dribbling creates a higher fidelity of touch on the ball for better control in tight spaces, more time to make decisions on attack, and more control over the pace of the game. Innovations in attack are balanced by a re-designed defending mechanism called Tactical Defending, which fundamentally changes the approach to defending by placing equal importance on positioning, intercepting passes and tackling.

FIFA 2012 requires a Mac with OS X 10.6.8 or later, Intel Core 2 Duo or better, 4GB RAM, and ATI HD2600 or Nvidia GeForce 9400M or greater. You can buy FIFA 2012 for $39.99 at GameTree Mac.

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Epic Games Brings Unreal Engine 3 To The Mac

Epic Games yesterday announced that the Unreal Engine 3 can now run on Macs with the arrival of the free Unreal Development Kit to OS X. Joystiq does note, however, that it arrives four years after Epic announced Gears of War and Unreal Tournament for OS X, but failed to deliver.

Every UDK game’s potential user base has increased dramatically yet again.

Unreal Engine 3 now supporting Macs comes after Epic introduced the Unreal Development Kit for iOS last year. Since then a number of iOS games build on the UDK have been released, including Epic Citadel (the beautiful tech demo of the UDK), Infinity Blade and Rage HD. LucasArts and Gameloft have also signed multi-year deals with Epic to produce games using the UDK.

[Epic Games via Joystiq]

Smartphone Games “Front and Center” at Tokyo Game Show 2011→

Smartphone Games “Front and Center” at Tokyo Game Show 2011

Wired has an overview of what’s going at Tokyo Game Show – annual exposition of Japanese videogames – this year: smartphone and tablet games are “dominating” the show floor, whilst long-time publishers of regular console games decided not to have a booth.

In their place, dominating a massive section in the center aisle of the show floor, are smartphones and tablets: iPhones, Android phones, PlayStation phones and all manner of Japan-only devices with keys that easily let the country’s millions of texters type out entire novels’ worth of kanji messages. Cellphone games have been part of Tokyo Game Show for more than a decade, but until this year, the casual time-killers lurked on the periphery of the show, in the backs of the booths, attracting few onlookers.

The impressive growth of the mobile gaming industry is no secret to those who have been keeping an eye on the explosion of “app stores” through 2010 and 2011. But Wired makes a good point in its TGS coverage: there’s one niche of gamers mobile games have failed to attract, and that’s hardcore gamers. The “regular console games” that have dominated the Tokyo Games Show in the past years, and which are struggling to impress on iPhones, iPads, and Android handsets.

One challenge for Gree and other mobile gamemakers: Creating mobile games that appeal to hard-core gamers as well as casual players. Gree President and CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka noted the dilemma.

“I was just walking around the show floor,” he said at a press briefing Thursday, “and what I thought while I was looking around was, ‘Console games seem much more interesting than social games. They’re more cool.’”

Gree, for instance, is the company that bought OpenFeint and announced a CEO replacement this week. The issue is a complex one: Angry Birds is selling millions of copies (350 million to date), yet hardcore gamers still can’t find proper mobile counterparts for their favorite PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii games. Big companies like EA are reinventing themselves with strong mobile offerings, and revenue speaks clearly.

I believe the scarcity of “hardcore games” or lack thereof is more related to the youth of these mobile platforms, as well as ongoing technological advancements. Lets’s see what the A6 will bring.

[image via]

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution Coming to the Mac

Feral Interactive has announced that a native Mac version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the critically acclaimed prequel to Deus Ex, will be released in the upcoming months. The game is set to come out during Winter 2011/12, with Feral’s dedicated mini-site receiving an update with more information about the title soon.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is an action-based role-playing game developed by Eidos and published by Square Enix. It tells the story of Adam Jensen, a security chief for one of the world’s most powerful corporations; in 2027 – Human Revolution is set 25 years before the original game – corporations have extended their powers beyond the reach of local governments. Adam is forced to undergo cybernetic augmentation to fuse his body with mechanical parts, and he’s thrown in the middle of a global conspiration.

From Ars Technica’s review of the game:

The game’s uncanny ability to give you multiple ways out of situations is carried right through to the final encounter, and the game even ends with an important decision. Every option you’re given before the credits roll is attractive in its own way, though at the same time, none of the choices truly provide comfort. Human Revolution can be oppressively bleak at times, but it earns its tone.

Although the game world has plenty of room for more stories told by future titles, this story comes to a very definitive end. That’s something rare in big-budget games today, especially when they take place in an established franchise. But a real conclusion just confirms why this game deserves so much praise: by the end of the game’s impressively long run time, you’re left satisfied by the story and the characters within it.

Below is the trailer of Human Revolution from E3 2010. Feral Interactive isn’t new to Mac game ports, having released Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition for OS X last year. [via The Loop]
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Distimo: Mobile Game Prices Fall, In-App Purchase Revenues Soar

In a new report released by Distimo today, the firm highlights how mobile gaming trends have changed over the past year. It found that the prices of mobile games have declined by 28% from $2.01 to $1.44 over the past year. The ‘Games’ category on the Apple App Store is also the most popular category, with 56% of the top 300 free applications being games.

In-app purchases have dominated in mobile games, particularly in free games where 35% use some form of virtual currency to monetize their app. However over the past year the amount of revenue generated by ‘free’ games and their in-app purchases has increased ten-fold. The revenue-share of games that solely charge an upfront cost now only occupy 27% of revenue raised in App Store games, whilst of those, the top 10 publishers dominate with a 56% share of the revenue. An interesting note is that Andreas Illiger (creator of Tiny Wings) managed to enter that list of top 10 publishers and is ahead of others including SEGA and even Gameloft.

When comparing the various app stores to see which had the highest percentage of games in their catalogues, the iPhone App Store came first and the iPad App Store second – followed by the BlackBerry PlayBook, WP7 Marketplace, Palm App Catalogue, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Android Market, GetJar and lastly the BlackBerry App World. In terms of the growth of games in the app stores, only the iPhone App Store and GetJar saw a faster rate of growth for games – the others all saw the number of other applications growing at a faster rate.

Ahead Of “Awesome” Launch, Screenshots Show Facebook’s Project Spartan

Last week, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg revealed the company was preparing for an “awesome” launch this week. A formal announcement is expected today at a media event at Facebook HQ, but several blogs in the past few days have claimed Facebook is set unveil a partnership with communication giant Skype (recently acquired by Microsoft) to bring video chats to the social network, an interesting possibility at the light of Google’s new Plus foray into the social sphere, which among other things features a Hangout functionality to start group video chats with multiple contacts at once. TechCrunch, however, seems to believe that Project Spartan, an HTML5-based development and distribution platform that’s being built with Mobile Safari for iOS in mind, won’t be part of the announcements today, which may or may not also include the long-awaited official iPad app, supposedly nearing a public release. Read more

OnLive To Bring Cloud Gaming to iPad This Fall

OnLive, the cloud-based gaming platform that allows you to play a variety of PC and console games from a web browser on your computer or any TV through a cheap set-top box always connected to the Internet, has announced that the official app for iPad and Android tablets will be available this Fall in both the United States and Europe. Teased several times in the past, it appears the final version of the OnLive Player app has been completely rewritten to fully take avantage of cloud gaming features such as voice chat and multiplayer, but more importantly the developers have figured out a way to run PC games on a server, send video to the iPad, and let iPad owners interact with the game using touch input – not just buttons. In fact, it’ll be possible to enjoy OnLive on the iPad with a standard controller, but according to OnLive CEO Steve Perlman some games will be updated to support touch controls on the iPad and the server. This means that whilst you’ll be playing a game that doesn’t actually run on your local machine and doesn’t normally support touch on consoles and PCs, thanks to the iPad app (and developers’ support) it will.

The power of the cloud is definitely the theme this week, displacing what had been assumed to be platforms that could never be displaced,” said Steve Perlman, Founder and CEO of OnLive. “The OnLive Player App for iPad and Android shows how with the power of the cloud, the question is not whether cloud gaming will be able to catch up to consoles, it will be whether consoles will be able to catch up to cloud gaming.

Check out the demo video from OnLive CEO after the break. Currently, OnLive comes with a native Mac app that enables gamers to play the rather large selection of title available through the platform.

[image via]
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Backflip Studios Hits Milestone With 100 Million Downloads Of Its Mobile Games

Backflip Studios, the developer behind the popular iPhone games of Paper Toss, Ragdoll Blaster 2 and Strike Knight today announced that their mobile games have been download more than 100 million times - as a comparison, Angry Birds has been downloaded over 200 million times. It notes that roughly 80% of the downloads have originated from the iPhone, with about 20% from Android.

Backflip has around 25 million monthly active users, which is already up from 20 million in December last year, even more impressive is the 2.5 million daily active users that Backflip entices across its entire network of games. Roughly a third of the company’s revenue comes from App Store sales whilst another third comes from advertising (last October advertising was worth half a million dollars per month for Backflip) and another third from in-app purchases. Backflip’s success isn’t slowing down either, its revenue and user growth is between double and triple what it was just a year ago and its free games generate more than a billion impressions a month.

The Backflip team, which is self-funded and has 23 employees, is ramping up for a number of game releases coming this summer. Launching today was Strike Knight HD, the iPad version of the popular bowling game, and then there will Shape Shift, Backflip Solitaire and Boss Battles. Most, if not all, will initially be offered for free, following the success of Backflips ‘Summer of Free’ promotion that drew the company a huge success.

[Via VentureBeat]