On Labor Day weekend, it's time for the lucky among us to...not work. For many of us this means shutting the lids on our MacBooks and sleeping our iMacs, but in case you kick back at your Mac, we found some sales on Mac games and fun-time apps that you might want to check out...
...along with our usual roundup of reduced-price iPhone and iPad apps. Who loves ya, baby? (Hint: We do.)
Have a splendiforous weekend, everybody.
Ambient Design reduced the price of its artistic Mac apps ArtRage Studio and ArtRage Studio Pro to $29.90 and $59.90, respectively. (They regularly cost $40 and $80, so you're saving about $10 on either.) This sale runs through September 15. Both apps are well done and let kids and adults create gorgeous art that looks like you busted out your oil paints instead of just pushed pixels around on your Mac.
Our friends at Aspyr are having some killer game sales on their GameAgent.com site. Civilization V is a cool 75 percent off, making it just $12.50 to download. And a bunch of other games are included in the Back to School Sale, including LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Batman, Sid Meier's Pirates, and more.
Not to be outdone, Feral Interactive reduced the prices on all its LEGO games for Mac on the Mac App Store. That puts them at $21.99 each, through September 5. We're partial to LEGO Star Wars Saga, but they're all pretty darn fun. And remember that buying games through the Mac App Store lets you put them on ALL the Macs you have as long as you use the same store account. Bonus.
And if you're a Mac gamer but you don't want to be fenced in by the games that are actually available for Mac, you probably already know that the OnLive streaming service (which we've covered quite a bit) lets you play oodles of top PC and console games on your Mac without needing to download them first. It's crazy cool. And they're having a big ol' sale for Labor Day too, with up to 75 percent off Full PlayPass access to these 11 games.
Big Fish is having a 99-cent sale on a ridiculous amount of iPad and iPhone games this weekend. Most of them are hidden-object games, well done with stunning art and unique story lines. But some other genres are represented too, like time management with Nanny Mania 2 HD, and Angry Birds-ish Pengu Wars HD. (Both of those have iPhone versions too.) Over 100 games are included in this sale, which...is a lot of games.
Audubon reduced the price of Audubon Birds from $14.99 all the way down to $4.99 through September 5 (Monday). So if you're going to take a nature hike, or you're just looking forward to the start of the fall bird migration, this universal app will help you identify all kinds of our North American feathered friends.
And finally, a game we reviewed just this week, Destructopus: Total Rampage, is free on the App Store this whole weekend, down from 99 cents. You play as a giant octopus who likes to destroy things. So that's nice.
