Archive for the ‘Facebook’ tag
‘Zombie Gunship’ Gets Another Expansion
Heads up: is continuing to build on Zombie Gunship [$.99] with the release of a third residential expansion this afternoon. The expectation is that it’ll expand on the fiction like the others, and hey, presumably give us another bodacious zombie-popping romp in the process, too. You can grab it now for the delicious price of $0.
Zombie Gunship is a little old by App Store standards, so here’s a little refresher for your mushy stuff. From our review:
If you’ve played Call of Duty, you may remember the levels where you fly in an AC-130 and target the enemies below in a fantastic display of aerial firepower. Well, Zombie Gunship is based on that idea.
In the game, you look down over an apocalyptic landscape and wait for enemies to appear on your radar. Suddenly, a solitary human figure rushes from the shadows, trying to escape from hoards of brain-loving zombies. This is where you step in to save the day. You must shoot the zombies below, before they eat the few remaining humans or reach the bunker. If one lifeless zombie reaches the bunker, it seals itself to avoid being breached and your mission is over.
We’re still loving this game, and judging from the response on the , it looks like its followers aren’t anywhere close to being done with it, either. That’s good. If the title continues to thrive, we’ll probably keep getting new content, too. Screens of the latest just below, by the way:
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Crytek is Building a New Social Network and Streaming Game Service that Can Run on iOS
that , the company behind the CryEngine technology and the Crysis series of visually high-end first-person shooters, is in advanced stages of a new social gaming network that they’re calling . Yes, GFACE. I’m as baffled as you about the name, “game+Facebook” maybe?
Anyway, what the service known as GFACE actually claims to do sounds pretty cool. It runs completely in the browser and lets you do all the sorts of social things you would expect from your Facebook, Google+ or Twitter – add friends, post about your interests, discover new people, and plenty more. You can also meet up with people online and enjoy media-type things together, sort of like how you can watch a movie with friends in an Xbox Live party.
And of course, you can partner up and play games together. But this is the surprising part – all the game’s are streamed from the cloud on GFACE’s end, similar to how the OnLive system works. There’s a drag and drop party creation system that Kotaku likens to Battlefield 3‘s Battlelog, and then everybody plugs into the game on GFACE’s servers from their individual locations.
The interesting bit is that the type of gameplay seems to scale depending on what device you’re using. Like the graphic above, someone can be playing a first-person shooter on their PC while other players are connected to the game via their mobile devices, but with secondary roles. The person on the iPad has a commander role from a top-down perspective and the person on the iPhone-lookalike is directing a support weapon.
It’s a pretty exciting prospect thinking about being able to play games with people online in this fashion, utilizing different devices and gameplay perspectives all in the same game. I need another social network like I need a hole in my head, but the other features of GFACE sound pretty interesting as well. That name, though. Yeesh.
You can see a video of GFACE in action at the original Kotaku article or . The UI is bananas, everything is so smooth and high-tech feeling. I’m actually eager to check it out. Right now GFACE is in closed beta, but whenever it finally launches it will be interesting to see if it’s able to make an impact in the fledgling streaming game market or the nearly-impossible-to-compete-in social network market.
[Via ]
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Creator of ‘Triple Town’ Focuses Legal Lasers on ‘Yeti Town’
They say that bad luck comes in threes, and that definitely seems to be the trend in last week’s news cycle. First Zynga ripped off Tiny Tower [Free], then Glu fired up their copy machines, and then some similar although unrelated drama hit the land of Triple Town [Free]. is all over this recent story, but I’ll provide a quick rundown-
Spry Fox’s Triple Town hit the App Store a couple weeks ago and it was clear that we loved it in our review. It’s even sort of an interesting take on the free to play model, as you can download and play the game for free and play for a limited number of turns. You can buy more turns with in-game coins which you can earn (and buy with real money) or just download the unlimited turns unlock for (currently) $3.99. If you don’t play much, or get bored easily, you might not ever need to buy anything… But once you get to the point where you need unlimited turns, chances are you’ve gotten way more than four bucks of entertainment out of the game anyway. I like that.
Anyway, , they’ve filed a copyright infringement suit in federal court against 6Waves LOLAPPS due to Yeti Town [Free] which actually beat Triple Town to release by nearly a month. It’s the same sad story we hear way too often on the App Store in that Yeti Town relentlessly copies absolutely every aspect of Triple Town.
Per Spry Fox:
Yeti Town, as launched by 6waves, was a nearly perfect copy of Triple Town. We’re not just talking about the game’s basic mechanics here. We’re talking about tons of little details, from the language in the tutorial, to many of our UI elements, to the quantities and prices of every single item in the store (how exactly did 6waves “independently” decide to price 200 turns for 950 coins, or 4 wildcards for 1500 coins each? That’s quite a coincidence!)
This exact copying is also one of the things that really amused me about all of these Tiny Tower clones which all featured 5 categories of skills, 5 people per apartment, 3 people to a floor, 3 products per floor, 5 elevator upgrades, and other exact copies of core game mechanics. Unfortunately, you can’t copyright a game idea, which is why companies like Gameloft are able to do what they do. Yeti Town is different through, as allegedly Spry Fox was in intense negotiations with 6Waves to publish Triple Town on the App Store which abruptly ended when Yeti Town was released.
As part of this, 6Waves had closed beta access months before Triple Town went public and had been “pumping [Spry Fox] for private information” which included design ideas, Facebook launches, as well as revenue and retention figures. This sort of elevates the Yeti Town clone to an entirely different level of shadiness, at least in my eyes.
If you want to read the full text of the lawsuit, you can . Now, let’s all go back to making our own original games, eh?
[via ]
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This ‘God Of Blades’ Debut Trailer Is Awesome
Big swords and slow-motion make us feel good on the inside, so we’re obligated to share this trailer with you. Before you gander at its splendor, here’s some context: this is a side-scrolling action RPG from . It’s called God of Blades, and in it, users will “assume the role of a nameless spectral king” against a horde of demon dudes. From what we can tell, the action model breaks down to whacking demons with overly large weapons until they fall down. It sounds cool in theory.
No word on release other than “soon,” and we’re not 100 percent sure what platforms it’ll appear on or, hey, even its price. We’re guessing these kinds of things will be announced on the studio’s or in due time.
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‘Triple Town’ Updated and On Sale for $3.99
Last week, released an iOS version of Triple Town [Free], their hugely popular match-3 town builder for the Amazon Kindle, and more recently for Google+ and Facebook. We really liked Triple Town in our review, and it’s personally been my biggest obsession of the past week. The ability to upgrade the game tiles by making matches and the limited amount of space to work within added a tremendous amount of depth to the gameplay far beyond your typical matching game.
Today the first update has hit for Triple Town, which mostly focuses on fixing bugs. Things like broken Game Center achievements, the inability to restart games sometimes, and tons of other quirks that come with a version 1.0 release have now been taken care of. The update description also goes on to say that there are several other known bugs that are currently in the process of being hunted down and fixed, one of which includes a problem with turns regenerating after exiting the app.
You see, Triple Town is a freemium game. It comes with a set amount of “moves” for free, and the ability to purchase in-game coins for real money which will let you buy more moves when you run out. Alternately, these moves are supposed to slowly regenerate while you aren’t playing the game, giving you a way to continue playing for free if you had the patience.
One other alternative is to just buy unlimited moves with a flat in-app purchase fee of $6.99, and with all the troubles going on with the regenerating turns Spry Fox wants to entice you to go for the unlimited option by reducing its price down to $3.99. After getting hooked on Triple Town myself, I had no qualms dropping the $6.99 for unlimited play, but others have felt like it was a bit on the high side for the kind of game it is.
If you’re one of those who felt the price was high, the $3.99 price is a lot easier to swallow, especially for a game packed with such fantastic gameplay. Plus, the maintenance update makes it a much more solid game all around, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing plenty of more updates to Triple Town in the future as well.
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‘Triple Town’ Review – A Match-3 City Builder I Can’t Put Down
I’m a little out of touch with the Kindle and Facebook game world, so pardon me if you already know this: Triple Town [Free] is amazeballs. Yeah, that’s right. Amazeballs. It’s also freemium, so I’m not actually sure what you’re waiting for. Go download it.
You know how Dungeon Raid [$0.99] took the match-3 thing and made it completely soul-consuming? That’s exactly what TripleTown does. But for those of us not into gaming in our browsers or on our e-book readers, it’s brand spanking new, something Dungeon Raid hasn’t been for a while.
So here’s the scoop. Triple Town is a pretty straightforward matching game with cutesy art and simple tap controls. It’s all about matching things in groups of at least three, a rather familiar task. Instead of clearing the board, you’re building it up. If you play haphazardly, making every match you can, you won’t get far.
That’s because everything in Triple Town can be upgraded. You’re given a six by six grid partly filled with randomly generated terrain. You draw random tiles to work with – a chunk of grass, let’s say. Plant it, and then plant two more beside it to make a bush. Put three bushes together to grow a tree. Three trees together builds a hut, and three huts makes a house. Each combination gives you a little breathing room, but you can’t outright clear anything off the board until you match up the very top tier.
When you put down the last piece of a triad the upgrade forms out of that piece’s position. It’s incredibly easy to end up putting your trees all over town if you’re not careful, and not so simple to actually build them together. If you want to do well you’re going to have to plan a few steps ahead and be ready to improvise. Occasionally you’ll luck out and draw a crystal, which acts as a wildcard, or a bot which can clear a space. You can also switch out one piece for safekeeping, which can save your city-building career if you use it well.
Then there are the bears. You have to murder the bears. Don’t be fooled by their cute little faces – they’re jerks and they’ll fill up your town if you don’t deal with them. You can kill them by trapping them, and they leave a gravestone behind. Three gravestones makes a church. Three churches makes a bigger church. Yeah. Suddenly you’re dealing with two separate upgrade paths all getting in the way of each other.
Since the grid you’re playing on is pretty tiny, mistakes don’t take long to come back and haunt you. The goal is to earn more and more points to upgrade your settlement to a camp, a town, a city, a megalopolis and several steps in between. Each milestone is a Game Center achievement, so let’s just say I don’t have many achievements yet. It’s easy to keep getting better, though. Every failure yields a lesson, and once you’ve got the system down it’s just a matter of putting it into action.
There’s only one problem: eventually the free ride runs out, and when it does, it hurts. Triple Town gives you a limited number of turns to work with – enough for a lot of free play, enough to get you hooked. After that, you can buy 200 more turns with coins. You earn more coins each time you finish a game, but it’s not really a sustainable practice. So you’re probably going to need to shell out. You can either buy coins for cheap and keep going 200 turns at a time, or you can splurge to unlock unlimited turns at a painful rate – $6.99 in the US store.
I won’t argue that’s not a lot to pay for a simple little game like Triple Town, given the App Store economy. But the game offers such a generous amount of free play that it’s worth getting even if you’re not interested in putting any cash on the table. Of course, you’ll need to rely on your willpower at that point, which might be a heavy burden to bear.
Sure, Triple Town is just another matching game, but it’s deep and surprisingly strategic. You’ve got to plan your moves out in advance while dealing with random draws and turns ticking down. You’ve got to balance spending your coins on the exact tile you need with earning enough each game to keep you going. It’s challenging enough to keep your brain working and simple enough to dig in those one-more-game hooks. So why not give it a look? The first hit is always free.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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A Quick Look At ‘Triple Town’
If you’re still into match-3 games, give Triple Town a shot. It’s a fresh take on the style of puzzle game that doesn’t mess with the purity of the mechanic, but it does do a good job integrating and introducing an interesting wrinkle: town building.
You might have heard of this one already. It has seen a couple of releases across other platforms, including Kindle and Facebook. The latter one should give you an idea of what to expect, actually. This is a free-to-play game with “social” game hooks, much like any other title on the social networking site. Where it departs is that it seems to feed off its best players in a particularly non-aggressive way. On iOS, you can just play and not worry. At least, that’s been my experience with it so far.
Your usual game goes something like this: each grid-based instance is a new, fairly unremarkable world that you need to fill by matching three alike items. Match three grasses to assemble a bush, and then match those bushes to make trees. The catch is that you’ll be given these tools at random and you can only “store” on piece at a time. Also, you can’t move any of the game’s pieces around; you can only put items down next to pre-existing items, which introduces turn-based thinking.
There’s more to it. After some bush laying, you’ll run across your first bear, which is a piece that you need to isolate around other pieces in order to kill it. Line up three dead bears, and you get a building. (I don’t understand it, either.)
Higher-level play involves doing all of this and using its currency functionality, which allows you to buy more moves on a single board — and if you’re just OK at the game, you won’t really be running to the well — and buying pieces that you need. The IAP will let you buy more coins or turns for real-life dough.
Triple Town has created a bit of buzz on our boards and … some grumbling, too. The game’s lead designer , revealing that it has been balanced to limit even hypothetical millionaires from slaughtering the high score boards.
“… In general a more skilled player will always get a better scores than a less skilled player, even if someone buys every item in the store,” he writes. “Triple Town often seems like a simple game on the surface, but there is an immense amount of depth and strategy…”
“To make things even more fair, there are only a limited number of items in the store. Even if you were a millionaire, the best that would get you is the ability to play more often but you wouldn’t be able to buy your way to a high score.”
He adds that he sees a lot of “expert” dudes who never buy items, but he also sees people who buy more stuff because they like the game. I haven’t felt pressured to buy anything yet, so if your IAP alarm went off, go ahead and relax.
Triple Town is free, so give it a try. It’s a solid match-3 with a cool new element that I think anyone with an itch for this kind of puzzle game will dig. We’ll have a review ready soon. Also, those bears! So cute.
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‘Hero Academy’ Review – Bite Size Strategy You Can’t Put Down
I’ve played a lot of iOS games in my time, and have gone through varying levels of addiction with certain titles. Even so, that usually doesn’t last for too long. I’ve never found my own personal Angry Birds or . That is, until I picked up Hero Academy [Free] for the first time. Shortly after, I noticed that I was playing a match while cooking, waiting for people to come over, or pretty much any other time I had three free minutes or more at a time. At that point, I identified that I might have found that game that I feel the need to play endlessly. Good news is, all my other friends seem to have the same problem, so that works out for me.
Hero Academy is ’s first iOS offering, and I think it’s the sign of good things to come. The premise is very basic: You are playing a tactical battle against another team, and the goal is to destroy their crystals before they destroy yours. Each round allows you five moves (”action points”), which you can use to either place team members and items on the board, or move and attack with your preexisting team members.
If you play the free version of the game, the only team available to you is the Council, which is made up of humans and is a well-balanced option. Should you wish, you can unlock the Dark Elves for $0.99, which can summon the spirits of their fallen enemies to aid them in battle.
At the bottom of your screen, you’ll see a selection of five items and characters, which the game randomly deals you each turn. If you don’t like what you got, you can use your finger to drag anything you don’t want over to the tiny door in the bottom left corner. Once your turn is finished, you’ll get new stuff and hopefully get dealt exactly what you were looking for. This selection of items includes spells and weapons to strengthen your characters’ attack and defense abilities so you can survive in the field for longer.
The board itself also includes some options to give you the advantage. In the middle of each board is a tile with a crystal on it, and reaching it will weaken the enemy’s crystal a bit. There are also tiles that have a sword or a shield on them, which will give you a buff to attack or defense. At the end of a turn, you can also choose to submit your turn normally or submit it with a taunt, which is pretty much just to piss your opponent off.
Getting to know your characters and how their skills can be used is vital. For example, the magician can cast a spell that can hit a row of opponents and only spend a single action point on it. Using these types of skills to your advantage will give you the edge needed to keep those fools off your crystals.
Frankly, I’m no fan of waiting around for someone to take a turn. When I first saw that Hero Academy had no single player mode where you could at least play against the computer, I was a bit let down. At first, I only had a few games going with other friends. The key to the fun of Hero Academy really came clear when I got a lot of games going, and that was when I started to feel my skills were improving and I was getting better at it. Considering my moves more carefully and how I could best defend against the way my opponent played was rewarding, and I started to win more matches.
There is one downfall to the game, and that is that the free version is relentless when it comes to in-game ads. Between each match, you’ll see an ad that you have to stare at for five seconds before it disappears and you can play again. If you’re good at ignoring things, you may not mind one bit, but if you’re like me and it bugs the hell out of you, you can buy any heroic team to get rid of the ads, which costs a buck. Only the Dark Elves are available for now, but Robot promises new teams are coming in the near future. You can also spend a bit more to get new avatars if you so desire.
Hero Academy is a simple game, and it does what it’s built to do very, very well. If the content continues to expand and offer more for the fanbase, I could see it being something I would want to come back to over and over again in the future. It also offers access to invite Facebook and Twitter friends to join you right in the menu, so never fear if you don’t have enough games going at a time. Invite everyone you know, and soon enough your phone will be jingling with the notification sound you’ve learned that you’re unable to resist.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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‘Age of Booty’ Coming to iOS, Android
Earlier this week, announced the “impending arrival” of a “new” version of for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Being developed in a partnership with , Certain Affinity promises that the duo has taken what fans didn’t like and has piled on new stuff, including fresh interfaces and visual flair, based on consumer feedback. Twitter and Facebook are also being jacked in, alongside new levels and new “strategic opportunities.”
Take note that this isn’t a true continuation or a follow-up. This is Age of Booty with new stuff (see above image), and hopefully some key improvements. And, hey, even though it’s not all-new, Age of Booty on iPad and iPhone sounds like a cool thing. We’re hoping to give you some impressions in the near future.
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Rocketcat Games Next Game Being Teased
If you’ve been listening to our show, you already know that Rocketcat Games has plans to release a free-to-play RPG based in its Mage Gauntlet [$2.99] universe. Earlier this morning, Rocketcat dropped another first-look at a class for that game . It even threw out some information on what it’s shooting for with the title.
“The Spellsword is essentially the same as Lexi from Mage Gauntlet. Anti-magic dash move, finds randomized single-use spells, while also being very strong in melee. However, he has low health compared to almost every other character.”
“Despite the similarity to Mage Gauntlet mechanics, we’ll be taking a lot of time to improve things with the Spellsword. The heart system will be replaced with a health bar system, allowing for things like armor that actually reduces damage.
We’re also looking into altering the equipment a bit. Some ideas include making some of the swords change what your charge-attack does, the spell-critical robes being replaced with new effects, and the spell trinkets adding secondary effects to the specific spell.”
In brief, Rocketcat’s Next Game will be a randomly generated dungeon crawler that jives with the spirit of Mage Gauntlet. Players will have different classes to choose from, and other classes to unlock via an in-game gem currency system. Since it’s free-to-play and all, those gems will be also be available as optional IAP downloads.
Rocketcat seems pretty serious about sharing stuff for this title on its Facebook, so go give that a follow if you’re into what it’s doing next.
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