At the WWDC 2013 keynote, app developer Anki took the stage and debuted a bluetooth-powered app called Anki Drive that pairs with robotic cars, giving them the ability to drive around a printed race track. According to the keynote, the cars know where they are and can react to obstacles in real time.
During the event, Tim Cook said, “Anki uses iOS devices and the iOS platform to bring artificial intelligence and robotics into our daily lives.”
Surprise! A Splinter Cell game made its way to the App Store this morning. Ahead of the release of Blacklist, the next game in the long-running stealth game franchise, Ubisoft has released Splinter Cell Blacklist Spider-Bot [Free]. It's a 2D action-puzzle game that tasks users with maneuvering a six-legged spider robot thing through mazes in an attempt to pick up intel and scurry away with it. Along the way, folks will have to disable turrets, avoid counter spy bots, and outmaneuver guards with guns. You know, the usual for a day in the life of a spider-bot.
While not a true Splinter Cell game, I guess, this still feels like a pretty cool way to get this franchise on phones and tablets. That's to say, it's easy and fun to play while staying true to the universe. It's not some rushed or bad virtual-button heavy 3rd-person sneaking game featuring Not Sam Fisher, you know?
WWDC 2013 in San Francisco kicks off this afternoon, and yeah, Apple has a keynote event lined up. It starts at 1PM EST, 10AM PDT and you don't have to be in SF to watch it. If you've got an Apple TV, for example, you can view it on there by clicking on the Apple Events channel. If you want to catch it on your computer, you can hit up the Apple home page, which should be streaming it live.
If you're the type of dude who wants to see it spoiler-free later in the day, our sister site MacRumors has you covered -- just head over to this post later in the day.
Video games! Chances are we'll see a handful today at E3 in Los Angeles, as four of the biggest names in the biz take the stage at their own respective events. If you want to watch alongside us, we've collected some links to various live streams and the times they start:
Evil's brewing, and it's up to the holy crusader and his pals to end it. Deep Dungeons of Doom [Free] celebrates a frequently trodden yet continuously enjoyable path with a suitably generic story and enough dry humor to keep it relevant. Wrapped in some gorgeous pixel art and animations, Bossa Studios has one satisfyingly bountiful iOS game on their hands.
Attacks, which are triggered with a tap on the right side of the screen, have a refractory period - you won't be able to mash your way to success. Attempt an attack while the ability is cooling and you'll prolong the cooldown. A tap on the left readies your guard, eliminating any damage the enemy might toss your way. Victory in each duel spurs the chest on the far side of the room to burst, spewing its contents of gold and, potentially, loot. A bottom up swipe of your finger will drag the screen up, sending your character deeper underground (and on to your next fight). Dungeon crawling without the crawling.
Super School Day [$0.99] plays like any other of the mini-game collections on the App Store, yet it manages to not bore by being (so damn) charming. From the second the game launches it’s crackin’ jokes, successfully entertaining with style and personality. Don’t be fooled, Super School Day is actually a not-so-casual, challenging, laugh-in-the-face of mini-game collections - and succeeded at becoming a by-the-hour affair with me and my iOS devices. These days games like *that* are a rare breed.
The premise is simple; you pick a student avatar and go through a day of school. Only, if this wasn’t a Second Impact game that might be ok. These avatars come with RPG-style personality and intelligence attributes that play a role in how difficult each class of the day is. Mini-games get played, then… you get to try and save the world; Dragonball-style punches vs. a meteorite. I emphasized the try, there, because that meteorite is one hell of a challenge.
Due to its inherent suitability to touch-based controls, line-drawing games are a genre that exploded in popularity long ago (in gaming time). Nowadays, it feels like there isn't much in the genre that hasn't been covered in some form or fashion.
Enter Ripstone'sMen's Room Mayhem [$0.99], one of the more thematically interested line-drawing games to come out recently. While the gameplay is pretty generic, Mayhem does earn some points with its original premise and well-done presentation.
In case you didn't check out our first impressions awhile back, Mayhem tasks players with playing traffic control in a men's restroom. Each restroom has the requisite urinals, stalls, and sinks, as well as an entrance and exit. Users come in indicating their preference to use a urinal or stall and you guide them to their respective location via line-drawing. After they finish their business you opt to guide them to a sink to wash their hands and earn extra points, or you can send them straight to the exit (ew).
Hyper Breaker Turbo [$1.99] drums up warm, fuzzy feelings of Breakout and Arkanoid. But the game is so much more – and not just because I’m no longer playing on a TI-82 calculator or Windows 95 machine. This is an indie upgrade from beJoy developer, Barry Kostjens, who also developed another blocky iOS game called Push Panic! [$2.99]. Multi-tiered levels, three delightfully distinct worlds, inebriated power-ups and 75 stages had me breaking bricks, circular doodles and neon triangles in Hyper Breaker Turbo for a good many hours.
In a typical brick-breaking game, you’re landlocked, moving your paddle from left to right. You always feel like you’re not able to react fast enough, especially when a power-up speeds up the ball’s acceleration. Hyper Breaker Turbo gives you a free-floating paddle. You are able to slide left, right, diagonally and every other which way within the paddle’s movement space, which is about three-quarters of an inch high. So when you get a Speedball or Bouncy paddle boost, you will have no one to blame but yourself when the ball starts to bounce wildly out of control.
I have to admit, I'm a sucker for graphics. Sure, gameplay may be the most important aspect of any videogame, but you simply don't want to play with it if it looks like the back end of a dump truck.
So there I was, looking around on the internet for games to review, and out jumped Shiny the Firefly [$1.99] from Spanish outfit Stage Clear Studios, and whacked me properly in the teeth with its pixelized perfection. This game is pretty. Seriously, it's like playing a Pixar movie.
The animation of the hero himself is just gorgeous. Shiny has a multitude of facial expressions, which are beautifully realized… you'll always know exactly how Shiny is feeling. I can honestly say this is the most emotionally linked I have been to a character in a videogame in a very long time, and he's an insect for crying out loud. Every visual aspect of this game has been buffed to a level of shininess usually reserved for the rich and famous.
The Gangstar franchise is weird. It's a series of games with little connection to each other outside of some pretty basic stuff: open worlds, guns, intense violence, and car jacking. You could probably say the same thing about Grand Theft Auto, but Gangstar is sorta unique in that each game is a crude copycat of whatever AAA sandbox game is toast of the town at the moment of its release. Rio [$6.99] rips off Saints Row 3. Miami [$6.99] direly wants to be Grand Theft Auto 4. West Coast Hustle [$6.99] does its best to ape Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas. And now Gangstar Vegas [$6.99], which takes cues from Sleeping Dogs and, of all things, Far Cry 3. As a result of this design approach, Gangstar as a whole lacks a voice. It doesn't have too much to say because it's too busy trying to be another game.
This long-running problem is, maybe, my biggest beef with Gangstar Vegas. Otherwise, it seems like a pretty competent open-world shooter. As we promised earlier, we gave it a spin this afternoon, spending some time shooting innocent bystanders and running away from the (short) arm of the law:
Now I'm not usually one to pick up a puzzle game, partly because there are so many of them crowding the App Store that are simply below average, but mostly because my brain is as good at solving problems as a goat is at knitting a car. But when I saw the pixel art screen shots, I had to download Little Luca [$0.99], as being a '70s baby I am a sucker for anything 8-bit. Luckily, the cutesy low-fi images aren't the only good thing about this game... far from it.
I'll get straight to the point, Little Luca is a stunner. The world that Swedish brothers Björn and Rikard Wissing of Glowingpine Studios have created is so beautifully crafted, you can literally taste the love seeping out of the screen. Okay, that came out kind of wrong and is totally disgusting, but this game is anything but. From the choice of the color scheme to the soundtrack that is as atmospheric as, well... the atmosphere, every aspect of Little Luca has been done just right.
Inspired by a small Flash game by the name of Flabby Physics, Little Luca is a ninety-level-environmental-manipulation-physics-based-puzzle-game, for lack of a better term. You start out faced with relatively simple geometric shapes, such as deflated balls that resemble chunky bananas, and at the touch of the screen, said shapes inflate.
Deep Dungeons of Doom [Free] is a really neat ... dungeon crawler thing? We don't know what to call it, actually. In the game, you play as various heroes on a quest of some sort that leads them to the deepest, darkest, and doom-iest dungeons across a fantasy-ass fantasy land. Each dungeon is broken into several single-pane sections, each of which houses a monster to fight. You're armed with just an attack and defend command. The penalty for missing either way is pretty severe -- this game doesn't hold many punches.
If you're still kinda scratching your head, check out our video of the game in action. Eli and I spend about 20 minutes in various doom-y dungeons and fight everything from skeletons to headless horsemen.
You know, I should also note that DDD's production values are off the chains. The look, the animations, and the sound work are all superb components of a pretty awesome whole. If you've been looking for a new, mobile-friendly RPG to tool around with, this is it.
Let’s be honest: if you’re a fan of Ron Gilbert’s work you’re already playing Scurvy Scallywags [$1.99], only reading to make sure I give the game a score you can agree with. Scroll to the bottom, and thank me later. For everyone else: I hope you’re looking for a match-3 that’s more than what the App Store has accustomed you to; because Beep Games’ latest pirate-themed matcher is exactly that.
Scurvy Scallywags takes a customizable pirate avatar island-hopping across the seas, plundering familiar match-3 gameplay, for loot, while defending from the likes of undead swashbucklers. 16 verses of The Ultimate Sea Shanty – a charming pirate-jingle you have set sail to collect – are sprawled across a dozen hours of gameplay, wrapped in an art-direction that often feels inspired by Spumco cartoons.
Scurvy Scallywags uses an unorthodox method of shifting around the match-loot, making it feel new while allowing more strategic control over the playing-field. Items, enemies, and swords enter from all four edges of the board, instead of dropping from the top like most other match-3 games. Whichever direction you choose to shift-items, while making an item-chain, determines from which direction new objects fill the playing-field.
If you listen to the podcast, or any recent TA Plays video, you'll know that Brad and I are crazy about League of Legends, the free to play MOBA that's apparently the most popular game in the world right now. So, it'd only make sense that were similarly super stoked for OpenFeint veteran Jason Citron's new title, Fates Forever. Check out the single screenshot that's been released so far:
As mentioned in our forums, this is the first title from Citron's new outfit, Hammer & Chisel, and they believe that while a ton of people are out there buying tablets right now, there really just aren't that many deep and complex games available for them. Enter Fates Forever, a MOBA that is coming this summer exclusively to tablets with support for the whole iPad line save the super-old O.G. iPad and eventually even Android tablets.
Needless to say, we're going to be keeping a close eye on this.
The silly and eccentric developers at Butterscotch Shenanigans are just about ready to unleash their latest iOS effort Quadropus Rampage, which we took an early hands-on look at last month and were quite pleased with, but unfortunately have hit a snag in the Apple approval process. As they spelled out on their blog, Quadropus Rampage was rejected on Monday for some minor issues, and while those were immediately fixed and a new build resubmitted, it's still hanging around in the approval queue.
They feel bad about this, because as they put it, "we know a horde of our iOS humans were wicked pumped to slap their greasy tentacles all over their devices" with the new game. In an effort to say they are sorry and to ease the pain of waiting just a little bit longer for Quadropus, they've made their previous release Towelfight 2: The Monocle of Destiny [$0.99] free until their new game finally hits the App Store with Apple's blessing.
If you aren't super sure what Towelfight 2 is, well we've got you covered. We took the game for a spin in a TA Plays video, and we pointed out all the reasons we enjoyed the title in our full review, though you should definitely consider the big post-release update that fixed many of the issues we and other gamers initially had with the game. In short, Towelfight 2 is awesome, and if you don't own it already then you should definitely grab it for free.
We'll keep our eyes and ears on the alert for Quadropus Rampage just as soon as it hits the App Store, and if you want an alert when it does hit then simply add it to your TouchArcade [Free] app Watch List, and be sure to pass the time until then with Towelfight 2 for free.
