Mac|Life - Games

Game Spending for iOS Outpaced 3DS, Vita in Early 2013

Leif Johnson — Fri, 17 May 2013 23:07:27 +0000

On the off chance that you need further evidence of mobile gaming's rapidly changing landscape, IDC and App Annie recently released the results of a study demonstrating that revenues for iOS and Google Play gaming rose sharply in 2013's first quarter. Revenues for the handheld gaming devices made by Nintendo fell during the same period. Google's still behind Sony and Nintendo's overall revenue for the time being, but with the rate of growth they reported during their recent I/O, it's expected that Google Play, too, will overtake traditional handheld gaming devices sometime during the next quarter.

Keep in mind that the study isn't skewed by non-gaming apps. Games account for nearly 40 percent of all downloads for both the App Store and Google Play, according to the study. The study also reveals that games account for almost 70 percent of consumer spending on the App Store and over 80 percent for Google Play. In some ways, as IDC and App Annie point out, such numbers might seem unfair to Nintendo and Sony. Both companies tend to experience explosive growth during the holiday season, which occurs directly before the first quarter.

But the study reveals that such seasonal cycles mean little to nothing in the world of mobile games for the iPhone and Android systems, particularly when you factor in cost and the availability of almost every game whenever and (depending on connection) wherever you want it. AllThingsD also reported that Nintendo and Sony are also simply against a staggering wall of numbers. The global install base for devices like Nintendo's 3DS and Sony's PlayStation Vita amounted to a "mere" 200 million, whereas research firm Gartner reports that more than 2 billion phones and tablets will ship out in 2013 alone.

There's still time for Nintendo and Vita to reverse their fortunes. One of the most touted features of Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4 is its ability to support gameplay through its Vita device, and in a more dubious move, Nintendo's been working with developers of phone games to create versions for its Wii U. Both companies also have a substantial list of releases planned for the coming months.

But such measures may only delay the inevitable. At least there's a silver lining--if this keeps up, maybe we'll finally see Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda on the iPhone after all.

Karateka Classic Review

Mikel Reparaz — Fri, 17 May 2013 01:42:11 +0000

If you were a gamer with an Apple II in the mid-'80s, there are a few names likely to stir nostalgic echoes somewhere deep in your heart; names like Choplifter, Hard Hat Mack, Ultima, and (most relevant to this review) Karateka. The first-ever game by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, Karateka finally reappeared as a rhythm-based remake in late 2012, but now Mechner's giving old-school Karateka fans what they really want: the unvarnished original, adapted for iOS and fitted with tweaks designed to tug at our sense of nostalgia (while also making the game less frustrating).

One of the first games to use cutscenes and motion-captured animation, Karateka was a marvel in 1984, although it's relatively simplistic today. As a nameless karate master, your task is to save the princess Mariko from the clutches of the evil warlord Akuma. This you'll accomplish by running through his fortress and beating down his henchmen in lengthy, one-on-one fights. You can punch and kick in three directions (up, down, and straight ahead) using comfortable, clearly marked onscreen buttons, and your enemies grow progressively tougher the further you go. Standard stuff, really.

Still, Karateka holds up surprisingly well. Its characters are still fluidly animated, pummeling enemies is still fun (and features the same satisfying crunch/pop sounds when fists and feet connect), and getting through Akuma's castle and its occasional traps is still a challenge. There are a few flaws that weren't apparent 29 years ago -- since all attacks do roughly the same amount of damage, for example, there's almost no practical reason to ever use any of them except for the front kick, which has the longest reach -- but these are minor.

Karateka Classic also features a few cool additions not in the original; while death in 1984 meant having to start the game over, you can now simply rewind to your last victory by swiping left across the screen. Additionally, nostalgic fans can alter the game's appearance to better fit their memories, with the option to see the game in monochromatic green or amber, or even with horizontal scanlines that mimic an old CRT display. Obviously, this won't hold the same appeal for someone new to the game, but the chance to try an important-but-obscure piece of gaming history for $0.99 is nothing to sneeze at.

The bottom line. Karateka Classic is a superb port of an excellent (if ancient) fighting game, and is a great way to rekindle old memories or to simply see what all the fuss is about.

Review Synopsis

Product:

Karateka Classic 1.0

Company:

Karateka LLC

Contact:

http://karateka.com

Price:

$0.99

Requirements:

iPhone, iPod touch or iPad running iOS 4.3 or later (optimized for iPhone 5)

Positives:

A faithful, extremely playable revival of the 1984 original. Onscreen buttons are comfortable and unobtrusive. New rewind feature effectively eliminates any frustration from a late-in-game death.

Negatives:

Rewind also ensures that the game can be finished in 15-30 minutes. No way to get rid of black border and expand to full screen. Fighting system feels simplistic by modern standards.

Score:

4.5 Excellent

Sid Meier's Ace Patrol Review

Mikel Reparaz — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:04:47 +0000

Firaxis, the developer behind Civilization, has been busy on Apple platforms lately. The past few weeks brought us the excellent Mac port of XCOM: Enemy Unknown (via Feral Interactive) and the kid-friendly iOS strategy game Haunted Hollow, and now the company's rolled out Sid Meier's Ace Patrol, a free-to-play, turn-based tactics game set in the skies above World War I.

Managing a squadron of four pilots, it's your job to direct them (usually two at a time) through missions that might involve bombing enemy supply lines, escorting bombers, or shooting down spy balloons — and which will always, always involve dogfights with two or more enemy pilots. While Ace Patrol presents an idealized version of the Great War — women pilot biplanes into combat, everyone sports a cheeful smile all the time, and no pilot ever dies — it takes a fairly realistic approach toward flight, at least insofar as its turn-based setup allows. Your input is limited to tapping on movement markers, but things like altitude, g-forces and the model of plane you're controlling affect which maneuvers are available in each turn, as well as how accurate and damaging your attacks are. And as your pilots gain experience (by shooting down other pilots), they can unlock new moves, like barrel rolls, tighter turns and loops that let them outmaneuver their opponents.

If a drawn-out campaign isn’t your thing, there’s also a two-player mode that enables quick dogfights, although as of this writing it only works by swapping the same iPad between players. There’s a network option, but it apparently won’t be functional until a future update.

However you decide to tackle it, Ace Patrol is light, fun, and surprisingly involving, although its "free" price tag is misleading; paying nothing only gets you the first six missions of the British campaign. Paying a buck unlocks 18 more, while another $4 gets you the French, German, and American campaigns — all of which are more or less identical apart from the uniforms and planes. Ace pilots are also sold separately for a dollar each (or $5 for all eight), and if your pilots are in the hospital or imprisoned behind enemy lines, you can also pay $0.99 to spring them all rather than waiting for them to recover. Strangely, none of this is annoying — the campaigns are reasonably priced for what you get, and the game actually limits you to three paid recoveries per campaign — but it can get expensive.

The bottom line. Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol is a deceptively deep, highly polished and surprisingly addictive look at the strategy behind old-school dogfights.

Review Synopsis

Product:

Sid Meier's Ace Patrol 1.1

Company:

2K Games

Contact:

www.2kgames.com

Price:

Free

Requirements:

iPad, iPod touch, or iPhone running iOS 5.1 or later.

Positives:

Seemingly simple, easy-to-grasp gameplay hides a layer of complexity and rewards careful decision-making. Offers a lot of enjoyable content (if you're willing to pay for it). Building up pilots and unlocking new planes keeps things interesting.

Negatives:

No way to "earn" paid content. Few noticeable differences between the campaigns. Online multiplayer not enabled in this version.

Score:

4 Great

10 Best iPhone Tower Defense Games

Andrew Hayward — Fri, 10 May 2013 22:35:18 +0000

Tower defense games sprung to life on the PC and have also thrived on consoles, but it's on iOS devices where we've seen the largest and most diverse number of great entries. These strategic affairs challenge you to protect a base from waves of increasingly tough and complex enemies by placing offensive turrets along the way, and the tactical thrill of managing an effective array of fortifications can be hugely satisfying. Need a brainy fix wherever you are? Here are our picks for the 10 best iPhone tower defense games, each of which offers a distinctive test.

20 Great Mac Apps Under $20

MacLife Staff — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:00:00 +0000

In preparing this year’s 20 Under $20 list, we loved the idea of presenting 20 killer Mac apps you might not know about—20 is such a round, pleasant number, and would hopefully let us find something for everyone. But $20 per app might not seem like the bargain-basement price that it used to, even just back in the summer of 2011, when we did our last 20 Under $20 feature.

But guess what? Most of these polished, stable, user-friendly, and utterly useful applications don’t come anywhere close to a full Andrew Jackson, anyway. Four of them are free, and only two cost over $10. We thought about calling it “18 Mac Apps Under $10 and Also Two That Are More Than $10 But Still Less Than $20, and By the Way, Four Are Free,” but that’s just too long, wouldn’t you agree?

In the gallery below, click the first link to see the application's Mac App Store preview page. The linked score goes to our full review. Click any screenshot to see it bigger, too.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown — Elite Edition Review

Mikel Reparaz — Fri, 03 May 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Resurrecting a beloved old gaming franchise for a modern audience seems like a challenging, thankless task. Even if you succeed in making something great, you run the risk of alienating existing fans if you stray too far from the original formula. When the alien-fighting strategy revival XCOM: Enemy Unknown was released last year on PC and consoles, however, it accomplished something we thought was impossible: It made just about everyone happy.

Marking the first time the venerable strategy franchise has appeared on Mac, XCOM tasks players with running a clandestine, multinational anti-UFO agency at the dawn of a full-scale alien invasion of Earth. Your time is split between XCOM's underground headquarters, where you'll manage the agency's finances, direct research into alien technologies, and manufacture cool weapons and gadgets based on those technologies; and in the field, where you'll direct squads of soldiers through turn-based, semi-randomly generated tactical battles against alien death squads. That might sound complicated, but XCOM manages to make itself completely accessible to players of all stripes, with plenty of hand-holding for those who want it, options that can make the game insanely challenging for those who don't, and the freedom to advance the game's storyline at your own pace.

While the managerial stuff is important (and surprisingly involving), it's the battles that are the real meat of the game, and XCOM excels at creating tense, high-stakes confrontations. Your enemies — which range from stunted, "grey"-like creatures and mindless insectoid things to hulking brutes and mechanical horrors — are largely concealed by a fog of war, making cautious probing of your surroundings a huge part of battle. Your agents are fragile, especially at first, so any miscalculation (like deciding to sprint across an open field and end a turn with no cover nearby, say) can result in quick, demoralizing deaths.

As a bonus, the Mac version comes complete with all of the downloadable content released for other versions, including Slingshot, a three-mission mini-campaign you can choose to play in lieu of the randomized special missions handed down periodically by the shadowy "Council." In all, it's a fantastic package, although there's one notable caveat: Multiplayer. Admittedly a small part of the game, XCOM's multiplayer is a fun departure that lets players build a mixed human/alien squad and pit it against an opponent's. Playing online requires a separate app, GameRanger, which you might not find out about unless you read the game's included FAQ. Coupled with multiplayer's one-on-one structure, this means it can be difficult to find an opponent, although hopefully that'll improve as the game's user base grows.

The bottom line. Deeply involving, satisfyingly violent, and surprisingly emotional, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is fantastic whether you're a hardcore strategy fan or just dipping your toes in for the first time.

Review Synopsis

Product:

XCOM: Enemy Unknown — Elite Edition

Company:

Feral Interactive

Contact:

www.feralinteractive.com

Price:

$50

Requirements:

Mac OS X 10.7.5 or later, 2.0 Ghz Processor, 4GB RAM, 256MB VRAM (ATI X1xxx/HD2xxx, Intel GMA, NVIDIA 7xxx/8xxx not supported)

Positives:

Hugely addicting mix of management sim and turn-based tactics. Extremely customizable.

Negatives:

Online multiplayer requires separate GameRanger app. Framerate can get a little choppy on lower-end Macs, although this isn't a serious detriment to gameplay.

Score:

4.5 Excellent

The House of the Dead: Overkill – The Lost Reels Review

Mikel Reparaz — Thu, 02 May 2013 02:10:14 +0000

On consoles, The House of the Dead: Overkill took one of the most well-trodden premises imaginable — shooting zombies in first-person, on rails — and used it to create one of the most memorably over-the-top games of all time. Taking tropes from '70s grindhouse horror movies and cranking them to ridiculous levels, HotD:O was gruesome, hectic, and — as its characters clumsily shoehorned f-bombs into nearly every sentence — so deliberately crass that it was impossible to see it as anything other than a comedy.

The iOS version, subtitled The Lost Reels, scales all that back considerably. Once again following the exploits of Agent G, his absurdly foul-mouthed partner Detective Washington, and two hyperviolent strippers out for revenge, it does its best to approximate the original as players blast their way through two creepy environments (a dilapidated mansion on the bayou and a filthy-looking hospital) filled with flesh-hungry zombies. Power-ups and secret paths occasionally pop up to offer players something new to gun for, and while there are only three zombie types per level (or four, in the $1.99 "Naked Terror" add-on level), they mix up their attacks just enough to keep you on your toes, and to keep the action from getting too stale.

Compared to the console versions of Overkill, The Lost Reels feels like a pale imitation. Its characters still swear copiously between levels, and zombie heads still explode on a near-constant basis, but the gameplay's slower, the zombies far less diverse, and the levels — which cut some of the original areas and recycle the remaining ones — are more drab and repetitive than crazy and threatening. And while it packs in two of the boss fights from the full-sized version (or three, with Naked Terror), they've been simplified to the point that any personality or challenge has been sapped away.

Taken on its own, however, it's a fun (if somewhat expensive) rail shooter that packs in an awful lot of blood for an iOS game. Aiming with its virtual-thumbstick controls works surprisingly well, and being able to swap between a pistol and shotgun to keep from being mauled while reloading adds a light element of strategy. Also, as stingy as the game is with its levels, it's generous enough with its in-game currency that you'll be able to rapidly upgrade your guns and abilities to near-unbeatable heights. And while you'll revisit the same areas frequently, the fact that the game charts different paths through them each time definitely helps.

The bottom line. The Lost Reels is a pale shadow of the original, but it does a decent job with what little it's been given.

Review Synopsis

Product:

The House of the Dead: Overkill – The Lost Reels 1.00

Company:

Sega

Contact:

www.sega.com

Price:

$4.99

Requirements:

iPad, iPod touch or iPhone running iOS 5.1 or later

Positives:

Fun and bloody, with enough variety to stay interesting throughout its short run time. Looks great. Generous with in-game currency and upgrades.

Negatives:

Three enemy types per level can get pretty repetitive. Floor plans get recycled a lot, especially during the first level. No sweary character commentary (or any voices at all) during gameplay. Having to pay another $1.99 to unlock the third level (and its two stripper characters) is annoying.

Score:

3 Solid

Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders Review

Andrew Hayward — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:49:50 +0000

Bullets! Explosions! Wreckage! Encounters are plenty hectic, online or off.

Storm Raiders is the best entry yet in the Sky Gamblers aerial-combat franchise, sending you soaring through two separate World War II campaigns—the Battle of Britain and Asia-Pacific War—packed with diverse missions, intense action, and impressive visuals. Even more notable are the eight-player dogfights, which span a large number of play modes (like team deathmatch and capture the flag) and deliver ample competition whenever you want it. The Mac version doesn’t control quite as comfortably as the iOS version, but it’s still plenty enjoyable.

The bottom line. Great combat and a tiny price make Storm Raiders a Mac flight favorite.

Review Synopsis

Product:

Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders 1.0.3

Company:

Atypical Games

Contact:

www.atypicalgames.com

Price:

$4.99

Requirements:

OS X 10.7 or later

Positives:

Excellent flight action in both campaign and multiplayer.

Negatives:

Limited control options. Keyboard/trackpad options aren’t ideal.

Score:

4 Great

Hairy Tales Review

Andrew Hayward — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:34:00 +0000

Click on tiles to change their orientation, and drag them to reposition.

Getting from one place to the next is trickier than it seems in Hairy Tales, a colorful Mac puzzler that finds you moving and turning various tiles to send the hero safely toward a goal. Initially, this means little more than evading hazards and creating a safe path forward, but as the 70-plus stages progress, you’ll encounter new obstacles, like enemies and fixed arrow tiles. It’s solidly smart and only occasionally frustrating, though the samey puzzles turn a bit monotonous before too long.

The bottom line. While not consistently enthralling, Hairy Tales is a pleasant and accessible puzzler for all ages.

Review Synopsis

Product:

Hairy Tales 1.24

Company:

Arges Systems

Contact:

www.hairytalesgame.com

Price:

$4.99

Requirements:

OS X 10.6.6 or later

Positives:

Navigational puzzles are smart, but rarely overwhelming. Good for kids and adults alike.

Negatives:

Turns repetitive more quickly than expected. Visuals (while colorful) are a bit garish.

Score:

3 Solid

Shardlands Review

Andrew Hayward — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:08:52 +0000

Guide a pursuing monster toward a beacon and he’ll be zapped from the screen.

Finding your way through elaborate and impressively rendered mazes is the goal in each of Shardlands’ atmospheric stages, and you’ll do so by clicking to make heroine Dawn move to a location, as well as dragging movable panels into position and clicking buttons. There’s a nice puzzle-solving aspect to the navigation, as well as a bit of action, as you’ll have to avoid hazards plus dispatch enemy beasts using your surroundings. But the thankfully deliberate pace lets you consider each move before you make it.

The bottom line. Nicely paced and presented, Shardlands offers an intriguing array of subtle (but smart) exploration puzzles.

Review Synopsis

Product:

Shardlands 1.0.1

Company:

Breach Entertainment

Contact:

www.breachentertainment.com

Price:

$3.99

Requirements:

64-bit processor, OS X 10.7 or later

Positives:

Intelligent maze-based navigational puzzles. Slick visuals and music. Deliberate pace is welcome.

Negatives:

Mouse-centric design can create rare interaction issues.

Score:

4 Great