Metal Gear Solid: Social Ops, a new "social" Metal Gear game, was announced this morning at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the series. A GREE executive came out to debut some sort of sizzle trailer, showing off a 3D game built in Unity.
Here's the interesting thing: Social Ops isn't going to be your normal, blown-up Metal Gear sneaking game. Instead, it's a card-based battler that will "let players relive the stories from past entires in the series," says Andriasang. Also, word is that Social Ops is also going to have a Mother Base building component, probably similar to the one in Peace Walker.
Details keep trickling in, so we'll keep you in the loop. Famitsu seems to have scored the exclusive on this, and has some screens.
Lost Cities [$3.99] is a game that's hard to quantify. It's built on Reiner Knizia's formidable game design talents, and made into an impressive asynchronous experience by The Coding Monkeys, developers of board game delight Carcassonne [$9.99]. It has a robust single-player campaign and most of the online tools one could hope for. It looks great, too. All of that sounds pretty glowing, but we're only a few days in and I'm already making excuses not to take my turns.
Lost Cities is, more or less, two-player Solitaire. Like Solitaire it's almost, but not entirely, mindless. You draw cards into your hand, and you put them in appropriately ordered and colored piles. You share the deck with an opponent, and ideally work against each other. Much like Solitaire, though, the game relies on luck as much as skill or strategy. It's also best played as a time-waster, without the brunt of your full attention. That zen-like state that comes from moving cards around towards a goal is kind of hard to achieve when you're only taking turns every hour or two.
That's not to say it's poorly designed—not at all. It's just a bit dull for an asynchronous multiplayer game. You take your turn, you place one card, you draw one card. Rinse and repeat. Normally I'd pad out the experience contemplating future moves or considering my opponent's strategy, but Lost Cities isn't really complex enough to make much of that necessary.
Playdek's latest iOS conversion of a tabletop game is its most ambitious, and arguably its most successful to date. Summoner Wars [Free] is a hybrid CCG / small map strategy game somewhat similar to Mojang's highly-anticipated Scrolls. This combination of deck-building in the vein pioneered by Magic 2013 [Free (HD)] with tactical maneuvering of the sort seen in Hero Academy [Free] and Outwitters [Free] is a powerful combination for gamers who are fans of both genres.
Summoner Wars is technically free-to-play, but the FTP content is basically a demo, disabling online play, and only allowing the player to play the Phoenix Elves against the computer (who only plays the Tundra Orcs).
The IAP is modeled on that of Plaid Hat's card game, with each faction having a "base" deck and an expansion set, available for 99¢ each. One IAP unlocks all four AI decks, deck construction, and asynchronous online play. Alternatively, one can buy the combo pack for all 8 factions for $7.99 (half price).
One of the first games I ever bought on the App Store was Solitaire City [$2.99], and I remember thinking all the way back in mid-2008 that card games work amazing on touch screens and how unfortunate it was that (at the time) the most complicated offering available was the same game of Solitaire I'd spent most of my educational career playing on Windows computers. Since then, there have been a number of collectable card games available on the App Store, but they all pale in comparison to the nearly 20 years of refinement and evolution that Magic the Gathering has experienced since the physical game was originally release in 1993. Of course, two decades of complexity, rulings, and card releases can be a double edged sword in that getting involved as a new player is potentially very intimidating.
This is exactly where Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 [Free (HD)] comes in. I've often described the previous installments (only available on PC and consoles) as a "gateway drug" to the Magic universe, and really, I still can't come up with a better way to put it. Previously, getting into M:TG required buying (potentially lots) of physical cards, and either finding someone to play with or attending an actual event like Friday Night Magic. Even then, you'd still deal with the fact that it's a complicated game that (despite Wizards of the Coast's best efforts) is fairly difficult to learn without someone teaching you all the little nuances.
As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the local coffeehouse playing Magic: The Gathering. The game was in its infancy back in those days, and I never dreamed it would have such longevity at the time I was building my blue/white Serra Angel deck and plotting the downfall of my opponents (read: poor saps at the coffeehouse who thought playing me was a good idea). While the habit of playing Magic wore off a long time ago, I've always watched with interest as new card games came out over the years, thinking that one day when I had time, I would take up the habit again.
Duel of Fate [Free] seemed just as good a reason as any to dust off my card skills, and I admit I was curious to see if the game's pretty, anime-inspired art could follow up with good gameplay. In case you've never played a battle card game in your life, here's how it goes: you start out with a small deck, as does your opponent, and you face off your cards to battle to the death. If they deal or defend from the damage, you're safe; but if it gets through, you lose the card and take the hurt. The object is to reduce your opponent's score to zero before they do the same to you.
On Friday we posted a hands-on of the upcoming Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013. It was great. Really great, actually:
Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 for the iPad is the full experience. I'd argue it's the best way I've played a Duels of the Planeswalkers game so far. The touch controls work exactly as you'd expect them to. Playing cards from your hand is as simple as dragging them on to the play field, targeting is done by tapping, and a few on-screen buttons control the rest of the things you need to do to advance the game. It feels so much better than playing with a controller.
As promised, here are a whole load of screenshots of the game. They're available in full iPad Retina Display resolution, which you can see by clicking (or tapping) on any of them. Take a look at how good the card text looks, it's night and day from the console version.
If you've noticed my various ramblings regarding Magic the Gathering either on the actual site or during the podcast, you'd know I'm a huge fan of the game. I've looked forward to the previous installments in the Duels of the Planeswalker series, so, it's not much of a surprise that the 2013 variety was among the things I was most looking forward to checking out at E3.
Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 plays very similar to previous installments, with a whole heap of tweaks and refinements that we've already gone over in previous articles. For players familiar with the game, 2013 does things like allowing for specific mana tapping. At the same time, it's gotten even more newbie friendly in providing you suggestions of what you should play on your turn if you're totally new to the game.
We got to see the iPad version for the first time yesterday, and while I had my doubts about it originally, Wizards absolutely blew my mind. I'm not sure it would've surprised anyone if the iPad game was a watered down port of the console title, with fewer game modes. Maybe it's my lineage of still remembering the days of the dreaded Gameboy ports of arcade titles, but things getting lost in translation to portables is just something I'm used to.
Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 for the iPad is the full experience. I'd argue it's the best way I've played a Duels of the Planeswalkers game so far. The touch controls work exactly as you'd expect them to. Playing cards from your hand is as simple as dragging them on to the play field, targeting is done by tapping, and a few on-screen buttons control the rest of the things you need to do to advance the game. It feels so much better than playing with a controller.
The retina display of the new iPad is what allows Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 to pull ahead from the rest of the versions in a big way. On the 360 and PS3 the only thing that you can really make out on the cards in your hand and on the play field is the card art. Once you're familiar with your deck, all you really need to see is the art, but on the retina display all of the card text is clearly visible.
Oh, but wait, it gets better. The best part of playing Magic is multiplayer, and Duels of the Planeswalkers comes with full Game Center support for two player multiplayer. The lack of four player multiplayer seems to be the only thing the iPad port is packing. The good news, though, is you can still play four player games, but you're limited to AI opponents. Regardless, I wasn't really expecting multiplayer at all, much less seamless Game Center integration.
Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 will be hitting the App Store on the same day as the PC, Xbox, and PS3 versions of the game on June 20th. Wizards is also sending us some screenshots, but because of the complexity of keeping cards in the new set a secret they need to go through a few filters before we can release them to the wild. We might have screens today, so keep an eye out for that.
It's official: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013, the third entry in the annualized Magic: The Gathering digital series, will hit this June 20 across Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, iPad, and PC. It'll ship with new decks, some finer points of customization, new puzzles, and new cards from Magic: The Gathering's 2013 core set.
A debut teaser trailer for Duels 2013 is available below. Don't mind all the fancy 3D work and animation because you won't be seeing any of that in the actual game.
Details are still vague as they could possibly be regarding the upcoming Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalker 2013 coming to the iPad, but a new video just hit YouTube this afternoon that shows off some of the new cards included in the 2013 release. Give it a look:
It's probably safe to assume that this is video of the PC (or console) version of the game, so it'll be interesting to see how many of the various visual effects transfer over to the iPad. Either way, we'll find out when the game finally hits sometime this summer. I can't wait.
One of the world's best CCGs on mobile, Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer [$.99], is now better looking and it's packing more content. In a recent update, developer Incinerator Studios added retina support for iPad, as well as three new IAP card packs -- Return of the Fallen, Storm of Souls, and an aptly named promotional pack called Promo Pack 1. It has also dropped in an "in-app purchase" manager, which allows you to restore, as well as buy, cards from within the app.
If this sounds good, go ahead and update Ascension. You'll notice some new tweaks, too: fast-app switching is now supported and a new 28-day online game timer round out what is sounding like a pretty sweet update for the game's most dedicated fans. It's nice when this happens, right?
I'd argue that the only genre more saturated on the App Store than match-3's has got to be casino style games. Whether you're talking slot machines, card games, and other variations, there's a bazillion of them. Well, the guys behind the United States Playing Card Company think they've got a compelling addition to the field, and that's through their expertise of being the guys behind basically every brand of playing cards. Aviator, Bee, Bicycle, Tally-Ho, Congress, KEM, and PokerPeek are all their products, and the company has been around since 1867, so they definitely have some momentum behind them.
Anyway, the United States Playing Card Company have teamed up with the marketing firm Digi117 who themselves are behind widely recognizable brands like Morton, O'Reilly, and even Carfax. They're partnering to form a company called Zeniz to throw their hat into the social gaming arena.
Who knows what will come of this, but if nothing else it'll be interesting to see how the giant of physical playing cards transitions to the virtual space. Casino by Zeniz is on schedule to launch next week, so we won't have to wait too long to watch this play out.
Here's a heads up for the many board game (Well, in this case, card game.) fanatics out there- USM, the same German outfit responsible for the iOS port of Settlers of Catan [$4.99 / $4.99 (HD)] just released a few screenshots of their upcoming adaptation of Rivals for Catanon our forums.
Check 'em out:
Rivals for Catan is a re-worked version of the Catan Card Game which itself is a re-worked version of Settlers of Catan. That's some serious board game Inception action right there. Anyway, the card games are a simplified take on the territory building gameplay mechanic that Settlers hinges on.
Details are fairly vague right now, but USM has mentioned that the game will be a universal app that's going to have both two player local and online multiplayer. Either way, I'm always excited to see these kind of physical to iOS transitions for "well known" board and card games. Playing with some random dude online is often so much easier, approachable, and generally substantially cheaper than just buying the physical game.
Go somewhere quiet and you might just hear us screaming "yes" at our monitors. Wizards of the Coast has confirmed that we won't be waiting long for Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 iPad. It's coming this "summer," and launching alongside the 2013 Core Set of playing cards, which will be featured prominently in the game, too. Ten fresh decks are expected at launch, and more presumably will come down the pipe as downloadable content.
We still don't know a ton about this version of the game, but a dude at Wizards of the Coast did recently blast out a statement name-dropping one of our platforms of choice, and seemed tickled by the prospect of opening up Magic to a hungry and new base:
“We’re excited to make Magic: The Gathering even more accessible to our growing player base by adding iPad iOS to the suite of platforms that Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 will be available on this summer,” director of Digital Games for Magic: The Gathering Worth Wollpert said in a statement.
“Given that the original Duels and Duels 2012 have been downloaded well over 2 million times combined since its launch in June 2009, our customers are clearly enjoying what we’ve done with the game to this point, and we’re thrilled to be able to offer both new and existing Magic fans exciting content and gameplay options on a world-class tablet platform that many of our customers have been asking for.”
If you aren't familiar with Duels, it's a little like Magic for Babies. It gives you pre-built decks, holds your hand if you aren't familiar with the rules, and lets you play against AI until you're good enough to take your game online. The previous two iterations have been fantastic, and we can't wait to see this new one on iPad.
Alright so I just screamed like a teenage girl in the front row of a New Kids on the Block concert. This morning Wizards of the Coast announced that a new installment of their Duels of the Planeswalkers series of Magic: The Gathering games was coming. Granted, this isn't much of a surprise since Duels has historically been incredibly popular, so much so that quite a few people (myself included) directly attribute the game to the resurgence in interest in the physical Magic: The Gathering card game. What is surprising is that among the announced platforms, Wizards also dropped the bomb that the game will be coming to the iPad.
Details beyond that are basically non-existent, but it's safe to assume that Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 will play just like its predecessors, except with the inclusion of new cards from this year's sets. I'm stoked as hell, not only because I've been playing M:TG basically my entire life, but because I think there's lots of interesting things that can be done on the iPad with the IP. For instance, a Magic Online client for the iPad?
I may be dating myself here, but there was a time when I was completely obsessed with Windows Solitaire. I wanted to see every pixel of the game's window covered in the cards that hopped down at the end of the game, and the obsession lasted just as long as it took to make that happen. Since then, stacking cards onto other cards hasn't held the same charm. Then I picked up Fairway Solitaire [Free / HD] and now I'd kind of like my life back, please.
It's not that Fairway Solitaire is particularly challenging—quite the opposite, in fact. It follows Big Fish Games' usual mandate of making everything as player-friendly as possible. But between the dead simple gameplay and the weirdly compelling golf metaphors, I'm totally engrossed. And reading around online and in our forums, I'm not alone. This game gets its hooks into people more than one might expect from a golf-themed card game.
Metal Gear Solid: Social Ops, a new "social" Metal Gear game, was announced this morning at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the series. A GREE executive came out to debut some sort of sizzle trailer, showing off a 3D game built in Unity.
