The9, the sizable NASDAQ-listed Chinese game publisher and developer, has made quite a few investments in the U.S. gaming market over the last year. (Reflecting, it seems, a rising Asian interest in U.S. companies, especially gaming.) As part of its international strategy, The9 has been full-steam ahead on creating better ways for international gaming companies and developers to make inroads into the Chinese mobile and social gaming markets, which have been traditionally difficult areas for non-Chinese developers to access effectively (and profitably). → Read More
Doot doo doot doo doo doot! Hacker Retrobrad created a handheld console that displays Super Mario Brother in a very special way: each sprite is reduced to one pixel. The console, called Super Pixel Brothers, includes all 20 levels as well boss fights.
The game is played on an 8×8 mutli-colored LED board and to hit enemies you need to position your single-pixel Mario over their single-pixel heads.
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2011 Boulder TechStars graduate Simple Energy is teaming up with San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) to help the utility engage its customers in energy conservation efforts.
To accomplish this, Simple Energy is running an energy saver contest that offers a social gaming experience with real-world rewards. → Read More
On the heels of Apple’s decision to phase out developer access to the UDID (unique device identifier) on iOS devices, mobile social gaming network OpenFeint is offering up a an alternative solution. The company announced today that it’s launching a single sign-on system for social game developers that will replace UDIDs on iOS.
The system will become available later this fall.
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Nextpeer is a newly launched mobile developer toolkit that lets game developers quickly and easily add multi-player gaming to their single-player games. With Nextpeer’s tournament and social SDK (software development kit), developers can add customizable features that enable their game’s users join real-time, social tournaments where they compete against other users for top scores or achievements.
The idea is so simple, it’s surprising it hasn’t been done before. People like mobile games and they like playing games together, but until now, the only way developers can build a multi-player gaming experience is by building a multi-player game from scratch. With Nextpeer, however, any game can become a multi-player game.
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Today, PapayaMobile, the social gaming network for Android, is announcing a new milestone: it has topped 25 million users, which represents over 940% growth since the beginning of last year. The company attributes the increase to both the growing demand for mobile social games as well as the rapidly expanding Android install base worldwide.
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After analyzing a data set of over 57 million purchases across both the Android and iOS platforms, analytics firm Flurry discovered that mobile gamers appear to be spending the majority of their money on “consumable” virtual goods. That is, virtual goods that are depleted when used, like a a set of grenades in a war game, or a fertilizer that helps crops grow faster in a farming game.
Less popular are durable goods (those that offer a permanent benefit) or “personalization items,” which are purely decorative upgrades. → Read More
NaClBox (get it?) is a port of DOSBox that allows DOS games to be played right in your browser. Right now you can play titles like Star Wars Tie Fighter complete with multi-voice MIDI sound and hot hot VGA graphics. It works on Macs, PCs, and Linux machines and runs under Chrome 13.
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Nintendo investors have been grumbling about Nintendo’s tendency to release flagship games only for their own platforms for years. Mario and Zelda have, in general, spent their entire lives on some sort of Nintendo hardware, barring a few odd versions released years ago. Why? Because Nintendo has long tried to control everything about their part of the gaming ecosphere, from developer licensing to hardware sales. Sadly, benighted investors don’t see the method to Nintendo’s madness, especially considering the 3DS’ slow sales as well as the rise of the smartphone market and are now asking the giant to branch out into smartphones.
This is a terrible idea. → Read More
Battlefield 3 is perhaps one of the most anticipated games of 2011. It arrives in October and will likely see hundreds of thousands of sales on day one. As a AAA title, it behooves BF3 to debut on the 360, PS3, and Windows at the same time. But the last several years have seen troubling compromises in PC versions, obviously being made because of console restraints. Just recently I panned Dungeon Siege 3, a major production if I’ve ever seen one, for this exact problem. But it looks like the shoe is on the other foot with BF3: maps are going to be more “compact” and player counts reduced to from 64 on the PC version to 24 on console.
As a PC gamer myself, I believe I have a valid right to be smug here. The shoddy console ports we’ve seen have been so blatant that for years we’ve wondered why they bother at all. And here we have (as they promised) a game actually made for the PC and then scaled down for the consoles. → Read More
We heard about the Playstation Vita’s online capabilities long before we even knew its name, but the official details are just now solidifying. We knew it would have a net-connected staging area for each game, and a proximity-based social tool (LiveArea and Near respectively), and although some of the functions there are intact, they’ve been tweaked a bit and the features have changed. → Read More
When I look at this odd, immersive screen, called the jDone, I’m reminded of Coleridge’s epic poem:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately jDome decree:
Where guns roared out, soldiers ran
Through caverns measureless to man
In a boot of Battlefield 3.
The J-Dome costs $1,200 and sets up in a few minutes. It fits in a package about as big as a pack ‘n’ play playpen for kids and works with any projector, creating a nearly immersive gaming experience by adding peripheral vision effects to otherwise 2D games. → Read More
The cool cats at A Dangerous Business recently visited a seemingly forgotten Russian arcade museum in Moscow featuring some of the greatest old video games you could ever imagine coming out of a totalitarian worker’s state circa 1983. For example we’re introduced to a game…
called “Репка Силомер” (Repka Silomer) or “Turnip Strength Tester.” Later that night, we showed the photos to our homestay host, hoping for some sort of explanation. She had never played the game but told us that the concept was based on an old Russian children’s story.
Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Sleep! Go visit a hobby shop to play D&D Encounters! This kinder, gentler version of D&D is designed to allow relative noobs to experience the thrill of pretending to be a paladin. D&D Encounters is, in essence, a way to play a quick, single adventure in one or two hours with a dedicated DM. You type your ZIP code here and reserve a slot. Then you head into the game store and play. The closest one to me in Brooklyn, for example, is the Twenty Sided Store, a place I’d never heard of until now. → Read More
When I was growing up, games were played offline — whether it was Number Munchers on an Apple2GS, or Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo’s NES console. But, needless to say, that 8-bit world is miles behind us.
Like it has done to every other industry, the Web completely altered the course of gaming. It brought connectivity and scale to video games, allowing huge groups of people to play each other in a single game, simultaneously. Even so, most video game users continued to get their gaming offline; as is often the case, online adoption was mostly limited to geeks in solitude. → Read More
China’s got game. A lot of game. In fact, the Eastern power is rapidly becoming the world’s leader in the online games market. According to a study released by business and consulting firm Pearl Research, the online games market in China will exceed $8 billion by 2014.
Though the Chinese gaming market experienced somewhat sluggish growth in the first part of 2010, by year’s end it had rebounded to 25 percent overall growth, reaching $5 billion in sales. Thus, it seems that it is no longer even remotely outlandish to predict that China will make up a quarter of the industry’s total global sales by 2014, with the U.S. falling to 22 percent, as forecasted by The Financial Times, via investment bank Digi-Capital in February. → Read More
BeyondReality’s Jeroen Mol has an interesting concept for his new Augmented Reality game slated to go live in the Android Market in the next month or so. His clever idea of using paper money notes as AR targets (you know, those little black and white designs you usually have to print out first and view with your mobile device) eliminates the need to have a printer around before playing the game. Of all the “mobile money” concepts I covered at the Mobile World Congress, this was the most fun. See the video below for details. → Read More
Apple seems to be taking over everything these days — they’ve done a remarkable job so far — however, there is one major lacking from their lineup: console games. There is a great opportunity for media delivery by way of the TV, and Apple certainly knows this. PS3, Xbox, streaming boxes and even Google TV have been making moves in this area for awhile; if Apple wants to make long-term success of the iTunes Stores, they need people buying into Apple TV. The gaming consoles have had a 1-up on the Apple TV for a while, just by offering games. Now, it appears that there are traces of gaming on Apple TV in the latest release of the iOS 4.3 beta. Could Apple be coming out with a gaming system and controller? → Read More
According to WSJ report, HTC has purchased at $40 million stake in streaming game company OnLive, a move that points to HTC’s impetus towards content distribution alongside their standard handset manufacturing business.
HTC also bough Saffron Digital, a streaming video business that specializes in sending DRM-protected video streams. The idea, then, is for HTC’s Sense UI to move from the handset to the television, an optimistic move that could place HTC branding on more than just phones. → Read More
Ushering in the new era of touch panels come the lack of feeling any mechanical feedback. Just when we thought it was too late, Ten One Designs comes out with Fling, a tactile game controller for the iPad.
Read on for more plus a video! → Read More
