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Posts tagged with "games"

Bungie’s “Pathways into Darkness” Re-Released For Free On The Mac App Store→

In August of 1993, Bungie Software released Pathways into Darkness the most advanced and ground breaking First Person Shooter for the Macintosh.The game broke new ground combining Adventure gameplay with the new First Person Shooter game that was just emerging onto the scene. As time passed, the Macintosh hardware and software changed and the game Pathways into Darkness was no longer playable on a modern computer… Until Now.

Pathways into Darkness was a critical success, and it’s widely regarded as Bungie’s first commercial success as well. As Bungie’s Jason Jones said in an interview in 1995, it was “the game that launched the company”. The same company that would show, four years later, gameplay footage of Halo at Macworld.

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Year Walk Review

Last night, I finished Year Walk – the latest game from Simogo, creators of Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit – and even if games don’t belong in my usual area of coverage here at MacStories, I think Year Walk deserves a special mention.

Calling Year Walk a “game” is actually reductive. Even though it plays like a game, Year Walk is an experience spanning various aspects of storytelling, Swedish folklore, multitouch interactions, sound, and additional reading material available in a Year Walk Companion app.

Year Walk is the most unique “game” I have played on iOS in years. I’ll try my best to describe its appeal in this post. Read more

Temple Run 2: 20 Million Downloads In 4 Days→

Temple Run 2: 20 Million Downloads In 4 Days

Imangi Studios has today announced that Temple Run 2, the highly anticipated sequel to Temple Run, has been downloaded over 20 million times in four days on the App Store. The original Temple Run was downloaded 170 million times across the App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore.

Temple Run 2 generated 6 million downloads in the first day, making it one of the most successful iOS launches to date. Looking back at previous record-breaking numbers for iOS apps and games, Rovio reported 10 million downloads in 3 days, but on several platforms; the Google Maps app (also free like Temple Run 2) was downloaded over 10 million times in 48 hours. Imangi Studios also announced that Temple Run 2 is currently the #3 Top Grossing App on the App Store.

It’s no surprise that Temple Run 2 is doing well as far as in-app purchases are concerned. The game is clearly more optimized for IAPs, with unlockable upgrades, virtual items, and re-plays: if a player loses, he/she can choose to continue the same run using “gems”. Gems can be collected in the game, but they’re quite rare; the easiest way to get gems is to buy them. The “play again” menu is named “Save Me” and it appears in the middle of the screen every time a player reaches Game Over: it’s a very easy target to tap, it’s worded in a way to entice players towards continuing a run, and it mixes IAP with items that can also be collected in the game, albeit less frequently. For the developers, I believe it’s a very intelligent implementation of IAP (a subject we covered last year); for the players, it can become annoying because – as far as I can tell – there’s no quick way to dismiss the “Save Me” screen, which disappears after ~2 seconds.

Temple Run 2 is optimized for IAPs in other ways as well. Users can “like” Temple Run on Facebook or follow the game on Twitter to “get free stuff” (again, gems). In the in-app Store, they can buy coin packs, a “coin-doubler” upgrade, and gem packs that go from $0.99 for 5 gems to $19.99 for 500 gems. Unsurprisingly, the App Store page of the game reveals the top in-app purchases so far: the $0.99 5 Gem Pack, the $0.99 5,000 Coin Pack, and the $4.99 50 Gem Pack. I’d be curious to know the percentage of users who bought gem packs by following the “Save Me” button.

Speaking of Temple Run, make sure to check out The Telegraph’s interview with Imangi’s Keith Shepherd. In the interview, Shepherd talks about the history of Temple Run and their decision to rely on IAPs, but the first answer is my favorite. Making a game feel like a natural “extension of the player” has always been a top priority of another company that knows how to make games.

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SketchParty TV→

SketchParty TV

I don’t usually write about games here at MacStories, but SketchParty TV is a real gem that I’ve enjoyed playing with my friends a few days ago.

To properly celebrate the end of 2012 and the arrival of a new year, we organized a dinner with a few good friends at my place on December 31st. As we waited for midnight with the company of good Italian food and wine, we took a couple of photos, shot some videos for future memory, and eventually got past midnight, unable to go out because of the aforementioned overwhelming quantity of food that forced us to sit down and rethink our New Year’s Eve strategy. Out of curiosity, I took my iPad mini and decided to try SketchParty TV, a Pictionary-like drawing game that uses AirPlay Mirroring to split the gameplay between the device (where words you have to draw appear) and the big screen (where drawings are shown alongside scores and team information).

We ended up playing SketchParty TV until 6 AM. At one point, I was laughing so hard at my friend’s attempt to guess a platypus (I’m terrible at drawing) that I dropped wine all over my elegant New Year’s Eve outfit (I’m also terrible at laughing without causing things to fall off desks and/or tables).

Because I don’t have an Apple TV connected to my living room’s old CRT television, I used Reflector for AirPlay Mirroring on my MacBook Air. With Reflector and my local WiFi network, SketchParty streaming quality was great, but we had to restart Reflector a couple of times. The app is extremely simple and, for that reason, insanely fun: you just need to set up two teams and start drawing. The app has a built-in timer for turns, and it correctly hides the word your teammates have to guess on the mirroring screen (so only you can see it). There are colors to choose from, three brush sizes, and Undo buttons; there’s also a Clear Page button to erase an entire page when your attempt to draw a woman’s stylized figure are backfiring. The app automatically keeps track of scores and saves an archive of games that you can re-watch at any time from the main screen.

SketchParty is a good example of how modern devices and software can make our lives even slightly better. It’s a simple and fun game, but I didn’t have to waste any paper to play it with my friends; furthermore, we now have an archive of our platypus drawings to go through for a serious amount of quality mocking. SketchParty TV is Universal and available at $4.99 on the App Store.

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Nintendo Launches First Paid iOS App with In-App Purchases→

Nintendo Launches First Paid iOS App with In-App Purchases

Pokemon iOS

Pokemon iOS

As reported by Serebii (via Eurogamer), Nintendo has today launched its first paid iOS app: a universal version of its existing Pokédex app for the Nintendo 3DS.

Once downloaded you’ll find a version of the Pokémon encyclopaedia which covers all of the latest generation of critters (from DS games Pokémon Black and White). This costs 170 yen (about £1.30). Four extra packs with monsters from previous generations are then available to download for 500 yen (£3.90) each - meaning users will pay around £17 for the whole thing.

This is not the first iOS app for Nintendo (Pokémon Say Tap was available for a limited time last year), but it is the first time the Japanese videogame company is trying its hand at paid App Store downloads. The app is developed by creators of the main Pokémon series Creatures Inc., a studio owned by Nintendo.

Nintendo aficionados have long wished for the company to start bringing its most popular franchises such as Mario and Zelda to the iPhone and iPad. Historically devoted to creating games only for its own hardware (home consoles and portable), Nintendo has, in recent years, started allowing other platforms and devices to use its brands and characters. Aside from this new Pokémon app, it’s worth noting how the new edition of Tekken for the Wii U console features exclusive Nintendo-themed costumes and gadgets. It’s also worth noting how Japan alone represented 7% of Apple’s revenue in Q4 2012.

It’ll be interesting to see if Pokémon will remain an isolated experiment, or if Nintendo will consider more paid iOS apps in the future.

 

 

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Kickstarter: Shaun Inman’s Retro Game Crunch - Six Games in Six Months

I haven’t covered many Kickstarter projects as of late: it seems many are getting funded but not delivering on time or backers are still waiting for the product to ship. Today, Shaun Inman has launched his own Kickstarter project along with his friends Rusty Moyher, of Bloop fame, and Matt Grimm, a great composer and sound designer of such games as Flip’s Escape. Together they are launching Retro Game Crunch, a Kickstarter series that will try to produce six original games in six months. Sound too good to be true? Normally yes, but with the awesome team I believe it will happen. Read more

Average App Size Increased By 16% Since March→

Average App Size Increased By 16% Since March

MacRumors points to new data by ABI Research, showing that, since March 2012, the average app size has increased by 16%:

The iPad 3’s Retina display and Apple’s more liberal submission policy have caused the file sizes of leading iOS apps to grow substantially, especially in games. The latest data from ABI Research shows that the global average app size across all categories was 23 megabytes in September, 16% more than in March.

On March 1, I wrote:

I see two solutions. Either Apple gets the carriers to agree to larger download sizes, establishing a new “average” that should work for most apps (let’s say 60 MB as Panzarino suggests), or they rebuild the download mechanism completely by allowing devices to “ignore” resources they don’t need. The second solution would be a “cleaner” approach, in that it would address the root of this likely scenario — that is, devices downloading apps containing all kinds of images and resources for Retina and non-Retina displays.

As we know, Apple decided to increase the maximum download size over cellular to 50 MB. This, combined with LTE networking, has allowed developers to be more relaxed in regards to their app sizes, and users to have reasonable download times on 4G (or DC-HSDPA). The solution I proposed earlier this year – a way to identify which assets to download for an app on a specific device – would still require a major rework of iOS.

Due to international pricing, this year I had to get a 16 GB iPhone 5. But I regret my decision. Something we’ve learned in the past two years (since the Retina display was introduced in 2010) is that that app sizes are only going up, and you’re never going to wish you got a device with less capacity. You’ll either be fine, or want more. With the iPhone 5 and Retina + Universal games, I find myself having to keep an eye on my available space, which is something I despise doing.

For the future, I hope 32 GB will become the new 16 GB, and I’m looking forward to 128 GB iPhones and iPads.

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Interactive Fiction In The iOS Age: A Text-Based Love Story

It all started with an episode of “The Big Bang Theory”. Protagonist Dr. Sheldon Cooper sits in front of his laptop, his face distorted by heavy concentration. He’s playing a game. Suddenly, he starts yelling at Leonard, his roommate: “It says there’s a troll!” Leonard answers: “Type ‘Hit troll with axe’”. Silence. “Oh yes that worked!”, Sheldon yells with a wide smile on his face. A few episodes later, the title of the game is revealed: ZORK.

At that point, I was curious. I googled the title, and just a few minutes later I was lost in the world of Interactive Fiction (hence abbreviated as IF) which is the official genre description of games commonly known as text-based adventure games.

After hours of research, I found out that although the first IF games were released in the early ’80s and quickly decreased in popularity due to the rise of graphics-based games in the middle-80s, the genre is not dead at all. IF has a vibrant and very active community of gamers, journalists, story writers, and modern implementations of any kind to emulate and play IF games on any imaginable platform. There are even modern development tools and languages available to write your own IF games.

In this post, I will discuss all these topics: the history of IF, the community and its current state, and how to play and develop IF — with a focus on IF and Apple’s operating systems – Mac OS X and iOS. The following paragraphs will be full of external links leading you to download resources, information wikis about IF, interesting essays and blog posts about the community, and all kinds of software you could use to play and write IF. Read more

App Store “Game Collections” Gathers All Previous Game Bundles

In our story about the first four years of App Store, we noted how Apple had been collecting apps and games in custom “sections” that, unfortunately, are often rarely updated and hard to find in the App Store once they are removed from the homepage.

For years now, Apple has been refreshing the App Store on a weekly basis to include custom “sections” showcasing hand-picked apps and games. These sections typically come with rotating banners and smaller “mini-banners” on the App Store’s homepage, and are later grouped into an “App Store Essentials” macro-section that includes several of past sections and recommendations.

Custom sections provide a decent solution to browse titles Apple has previously “curated”; however, these sections aren’t usually updated as often as they are created — N.O.V.A. 3, a new shooter game by Gameloft, still isn’t listed under Benchmark Games: Stunning Graphics, whilst the majority of reviewers and publications have outlined the game’s remarkable graphic capabilities.

With today’s weekly refresh of the App Store’s homepage, it appears Apple has started taking some first steps into a new direction – grouping all previous game bundles into a bigger “collection”. Aptly named Game Collections and linked from the App Store’s homepage, the section offers a roundup of every selection Apple offered to date.

Game Collections includes:

Previously only available through the App Store’s homepage or partially through the dedicated Games category page, the new Game Collections feature brings some much needed organization to the custom sections Apple has been “curating” over the years. They are now accessible from a single place, and Apple notes how they will be “updated on a regular basis”.

As of today, “regular” apps still aren’t being organized into a unified collection. Right now, the App Store Essentials page is the best way to browse previously featured selections, but it also still mixes games and apps, and doesn’t provide the same elegant and simple layout of Game Collections. Hopefully Apple will provide an “App Collections” page as well, bringing past handpicked app selections and features in a single page.

Apple has been making a series of improvements to the App Store’s navigation lately. Aside from the complete App Store revamp coming in iOS 6, Apple redesigned the App of the Week section and renamed it to Editor’s Choice, leaving the former “App of the Week” to free app promotions.

App Store navigation and curation has long been an issue for third-party developers, with Apple’s Phil Schiller recently weighing in, too, noting how “you can still get discovered and get a hit overnight”.