TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the “record-your-own-voice” storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can customize with your own photos, camera shots, music, narration, and more. The resulting creations can then be shared with family and friends. And, for a little inspiration, the built-in TinyTap store offers a collection of pre-made games which kids can customize with their own voice and actions.
→ Read More
EA’s big shift toward treating games as services instead of packaged goods is going to mean restructuring this year.
Chief executive John Riccitiello said in today’s earnings call that there will be some layoffs as the company increases production of online, mobile, and social games. While EA beat earnings estimates for the quarter ending in March, its shares fell in after-hours trading by as much as 9.5 percent. The company has slipped nearly 20 percent since its last earnings call in February.
EA said in the statement that the move was being launched “to align the company’s cost structure with its ongoing digital transformation.” For some quick history: About a month ago, Derek Anderson reported that EA would be laying off 500+ employees, which came on the heels of its big Popcap acquisition, the departure of its CFO, and the ignominious title of being named “the worst company in America,” according to The Consumerist. → Read More
It’s not every day that you see code like this:
Yep. That’s assembly language, about as far from Ruby as you can get. It’s from the original, Apple II version of Prince of Persia, one of the best games in anyone’s childhood, anywhere. As we mentioned before, Jordan Mechner found the original disks in his father’s place last month and was looking for someone to help pull the files off of the disks. Thanks to Jason Scott, Mechner held a copy party in his house to drag, kicking and screaming, into the light of day. → Read More
In the world of indie gaming, Minecraft is undoubtedly in a league of its own. The sandbox game has already sold more than 5 million copies and has spawned its own subculture of fan sites and clones. Now, the game’s creator Notch (nee Marcus Persson), has announced his next project called 0x10c: a multi-player space game set in 281,474,976,712,644 AD. Besides the usual space battles, trading and mining we have come to expect from these kinds of games, 0x10c will also feature a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that will control your spaceship and that will be fully programmable by the player. → Read More
Disney and Japanese mobile gaming giant DeNA announced a new partnership this morning that will see their first jointly developed mobile social games launched on DeNA’s Mobage social gaming platform, beginning later this month.
The first title to arrive, “Disney Party,” was released on March 28th to the Mobage network in Japan, which serves a mobile gaming audience of over 35 million. On April 2nd, a second title will arrive in Japan called “Disney Fantasy Quest.” These two games will involve Disney’s own characters, but will be followed by a third, (yet to be named) card game battle that’s based on Marvel Comics characters. → Read More
Prince of Persia and Karateka, were two of the best action games of their era. Why? Because they gave us an inkling of what real, fluid graphical motion would look like in a few years’ time and, more important, were pretty much amazing if you were used to the Atari 2600 and River Raid. I remember playing Karateka before school at age ten, chopping my way through enemies on my way to save my sweetie and then, a few years later, playing PoP. Both were amazing.
Why? Because he created smooth, believable animation at eight frames per second on machines that were more suited to games like The Oregon Trail. He also created action games that led to realistic titles like Tekken that used real, human motion in order to add amazing realism.
A funny thing happened about ten years ago. The creator of these games, Jordan Mechner, apparently lost the original PoP source code and hunted all over for it, asking former Broderbund employees and digging through old files. The files – stored on 3.5-inch floppy disks – contained the original machine code for the game. The only way to actually play the game, until today, was run an emulated, extracted ROM. → Read More
BrowserQuest, playable in a browser near you, is a proof of concept so ingenious that you’ll wonder why they didn’t just build a Zelda clone and be done with it. In short, the site is a multi-player RPG based entirely on HTML5 with no Flash to be found.
The source code is free and open source and it uses WebSockets to communicate with a central server in order to render the movement of the other players. Quest states are saved automatically (although the quests are pretty limited in this demo.)
→ Read More
Android may be the most popular mobile browser, having today overtaken Opera, but when it comes to HTML5 performance, it looks like iOS is king. This at least according to a new report from spaceport.io, which claims to be the “first-ever report on the technology’s performance on top smartphone and tablet platforms”.
And it’s about time. With Facebook and major carriers and OEMs backing it, HTML5 has been gaining ground as a viable technology to support rich mobile apps on many of today’s most popular platforms. Interestingly, many had surmised that HTML5 might throw a wrench in Apple’s quest to become the dominant mobile platform, but spaceport’s “PerfMarks report” showed that iOS devices and browsers (iPhone, iPad, and Safari) outperformed its Android competitors across the board when it came to rendering movement on-screen. → Read More
Yesterday, we took a look at the growing comfort consumers, specifically gamers, have with purchasing virtual goods and currency on the web and mobile devices. Virtual goods are becoming a booming market thanks to the growing maturity of gaming platforms, free-to-play models and the profusion of mobile devices.
Today, international investment firm Digi-Capital published its in-depth review of the global gaming space, giving us a sense of the size, breadth and activity of the very international gaming market last year that is contributing to the changing behavior around virtual commerce — as well as a glimpse into what we can expect from the industry over the course of 2012. → Read More
If you own a tablet and have children, chances are that this will not come as news to you. For those who don’t but work in mobile, it’s something worth remembering when you’re concocting up your next big product: Kids are crazy about tablets.
According to some research out today from Nielsen in the U.S., in households that own a tablet, seven out of 10 children under the age of 12 use them. And that usage is on the rise: those numbers are for Q4 2011, and are a nine percent increase on the quarter before. → Read More
Good Old Games is running a $4.99 sale on multiple Sierra titles including Space Quest and Kings Quest. The games come in packages of three and are compatible with Windows (sorry, Mac users, but here’s a consolation prize).
→ Read More
Six months ago, Brass Monkey had built and released some well-developed software development kits (SDKs) for Android, iOS, and beyond that, simply put, enabled gamers to turn their mobile devices into remote controllers, with support for Flash, Unity3D, and desktop games and apps. The Brass Monkey team, CEO Chris Allen tells us, believed that bringing the functionality of a Wii controller to smart devices was something gamers could get excited about — but, at the time, they were missing one important piece. Support that would allow gamers to play on the browser. So they went about acq-hiring Emotely and its Founder and CEO Francois Laberge, bringing him on as CTO. → Read More
It appears the iPad gamepad of our dreams has finally arrived. The 60beat is a full-sized gamepad designed for iOS devices and it connects to iPads and iPhones via the headphone jack. While there aren’t many games that support the technology (yet), the concept is fairly simple. The controller works by sending signals through the devices’ microphone jack. → Read More
Once upon a time, Facebook game companies like Zynga fattened up their user counts thanks to viral distribution to non-gamers through the news feed. Facebook later curtailed this channel, forcing developers to concentrate on paid marketing and true word of mouth to grow. A new boom period could be coming, this time for mobile developers, as Facebook announced today that it is testing game stories in the mobile news feed. This could attract devs to its recently launched HTML5 mobile gaming platform with bait of reaching hundreds of millions of daily active Facebook mobile users.
→ Read More
In our previous post, we listed the top 20 iPhone and iPad apps of the year. But games are in a class by themselves, often pushing the limits of the hardware, software, and graphics capabilities of Apple’s iOS devices.
Instead of combining the platform’s great games with all of the other apps you should know about, here are our picks for the top 20 iOS games of the year: → Read More
Mobile games network PapayaMobile is launching a new accelerator for mobile, social game developers called “The Games Academy,” which will kick off in Q1 2012. Like most accelerators, Papaya will be providing developers with office space, support from a team of industry veterans, legal advice and an opportunity to pitch VC’s.
However, there won’t be any seed capital provided, nor is the company taking an equity stake in the startups who join. Instead, Papaya only requires the teams use its Social Game Engine in their game’s development. Then at the end of the program, a “winning” team will be awarded with a grand prize of 100,000 guaranteed downloads. → Read More
WowWee, not content with creating singing Elvis heads, is branching out into AppGear Appcessories – apps that require AR-based accessories, allowing you to interact with real environments using an iPhone or iPod Touch. These games, arriving in stores in April, include a zombie game where you’re the zombies fighting off upset homeowners (What a twist!) and an air battle game that actually uses tiny foam planes attached to the front of your phone to simulate flying in three-dimensional space.
The games will cost $9.99 and include various collectable parts. For example, the zombie game, Zombie Burbz, includes four collectable figurines. Of of the figurines has a set of conductive pads on the bottom and, using the iPad’s multi-touch screen, you control the action by moving the figurine across the virtual board. → Read More
Do you hate your Facebook friends? Do you want to blow them all up in fiery blasts of laser light? Sure, we all do.
FaceInvaders allows you to shoot down your social graph. The game is a simple Space Invaders clone with a twist – each alien is a face randomly selected from your Facebook account. You shoot down friends hither and yon, allowing you to passive-aggressively destroy the people who you pretend to love.
→ Read More
Aces Hangout is a new, in development product from the team at Hettema&Bergsten, which you may remember as the makers of the Twitter trend tracker, StrawberryJ.am. The online application brings a unique twist to online gambling, thanks to its integration with Google+’s multi-person video chat feature, Google+ Hangouts.
Unlike other video poker games, where users often play as online avatars, Aces Hangout feels more like a real world card game. You can watch live video feeds of the other players in Google+’s Hangouts, allowing to you to guess at who’s bluffing and who’s not – something that’s key to the offline poker experience. → Read More
The launch of Sony’s new handheld console Vita in Japan is just two months away (December 17), so it’s about time big S made some official announcements regarding software prices. In a nut shell, the first batch of titles will not be sold for cheap.
To be more concrete, the prices for a total of four launch games are now fixed. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
