Gamezebo Archives - March 2012

Everybody should own at least one tank. They're good for getting through traffic jams, intimidating idiot drivers, and clearing moose off the road at northern latitudes. Unfortunately, THE MAN says you can't physically own a tank, but Floppy Entertainment might have the next best thing: an idea for a tank-based game called lil' Sherman.

Take the high-speed, futuristic racer F-Zero and combine it with the endless run formula of Temple Run, and you’ve got yourself SGN’s new app: Ion Racer. Introducing fast-paced endless run gameplay with rich, colorful graphics, SGN aims to shake up the racing charts. While Ion Racer might be a little too fast for its own good, its exciting presentation is worth a place on your iOS device.

Hidden away on the second floor of an office building in Madison, Wisconsin is one of the most creative and active tech companies one could imagine -- and you'd never know it just driving by. PerBlue, the creators of the first-of-its-kind location-based RPG Parallel Kingdom, sit perched in for what most people would be a spacious layout. Then again, most people don't have 35 employees crammed into the equivalent of a two bedroom apartment. But limited square-footage hasn't cramped PerBlue's growth, as evident with their upcoming release, Parallel Mafia.

According to a press release that was distributed today, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has teamed up with Zynga to bring Martha Stewart to the hit social game Castleville. It's a good thing--but it's also a strange thing.

Bigpoint is adding new rabbits, birds, and cats to its massively popular Farmerama browser game, but they’re not anything like the normal animals you’d expect to see on the farm. A new partnership between Warner Bros. Consumer Products and Bigpoint will be bringing the Looney Tunes gang to Farmerama from late March to the end of June.

Slots games are all the rage on Facebook right now, so much so that you'd wonder why anyone would want to enter such a crowded sub-genre of casual gaming. For the former Playfish employees who started Plumbee, though, the reason is probably that they feel they’ve struck on a winning formula. The result of that thinking is the company's first game, Mirrorball Slots, which put a fairytale spin on authentic slots action.

Ain't the Internet great? Here I am sitting in a chilly Chicago apartment during the last days of March, and I can now say I spent Spring Break running a trendy beach resort thanks to iZ's Paradise Club. Sure, my buddies in Florida may come back with genuine tans, but I significantly increased the club's income and helped save a newlywed couple's honeymoon. Alas, I just couldn't stand the working conditions. Not only was news of almost major action working its way onto my Facebook wall, but I also found myself being charge when I couldn't find a helping hand.

Have you ever wanted to live out the most glamorous parts of the celebrity lifestyle (hint: the parts that come before the endless ream of cruddy roles, the binge drinking, and the wrecked hotel rooms)? Seismic Games has your dreams covered with CelebrityMe, a character-driven social game that lets you build a celebrity, assemble a movie or him or her to star in, and then invites you to interact with the fans and the paparazzi (no fists, please).

When it comes to freemium mobile games, few developers are as notable as The Playforge. Responsible for both Zombie Farm and Zombie Life, these gamemakers have just released their third title into the woods, and it’s about as far from their previously undead stomping grounds as you can imagine. Welcome to Tree World.

We cover plenty of new games here at Gamezebo every week, but the number of games we’ve already covered that show up on new platforms? It’s staggering. Starting this Wednesday and continuing every week, we’ll be rounding up the games that aren’t quite new, but might be new to you depending on your platform of choice.

The old west town of Deadwood has long been cursed by the undead ghost of the outlaw Blackjack, a man who killed 21 men in life, but even more in death. The town has been all but abandoned, save for a grandmother and her grandson, who now seem to be the next potential victims on Blackjack’s list. As a psychic, paranormal detective, you’ll need to discover how to put Blackjack to rest once and for all and save the few survivors and yourself from a grisly fate.

It’s always nice to see an iOS game riff on classic video gaming franchises without openly ripping off themes or visual motifs. Swordigo from TouchFoo manages to recall elements of beloved console games such as Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Metroid, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night with action/platformer/RPG aspects set around original yet familiar characters, tropes, and conventions. Ideally, that should pique your interest with a mild bemusement noise.

War is Hell, though maybe it'd be a lot cooler if soldiers were generated via slot machines. That's the basic concept behind Slot Heroes, an upcoming iOS strategy/combat/slot game that's being put together by Molecube.

Ravenous Games, the studio behind League of Evil is going in a softer, kinder, more whiskered direction for its next iOS game. The title, Burger Cat, is a platform-puzzler starring a chubby orange cat. Wait a minute--cats are the embodiment of domesticated evil, so maybe Ravenous Games isn't venturing too far out of familiar territory after all.

If Nintendo ever decided to release a Pokemon game for the iOS, mathematicians would need to invent a new denomination to tally the amount of money that the project would rake in. Pokemon iOS is not going to happen, though: Nintendo would sooner put Shigeru Miyamoto in charge of the company's janitorial staff. So it's up to independent developers like Calis Projects to fill in the gap with their own monster-collecting games.

When people think of puzzle platformers, they tend to think of two dimensional releases with two dimensional solutions. But what if you took that 2D puzzle solving and set it in a unique 3D environment? That’s the case with Rinth Island, an upcoming puzzler from Chillingo and Buzz Monkey Software.

On its iTunes page, Carota! is described as an “SNES-styled puzzle game” which was inspired by the likes of Pipe Dream. However, instead of connecting pipes to contain a slow-but-steady ooze, you are instead helping Thaddeus the Cabbit make his way back to the surface after being knocked down a hole into what looks like the wrong side of the tracks in Wonderland. To do this, you must twist and maneuver tiles into place so that he can reach the goal.

Rune Raiders takes the turn based strategy dungeon crawler formula and boils it down to the bare minimum essence of the genre. It’s light on story, graphics, music and seemingly every other metric for judging a game. For instance, the on-screen representation of your heroes are just pictures of their faces moving around a grid. Yet for a weirdly stripped down game it’s compelling enough to be worth a look, though it might take some explaining.

It’s easy to picture Zynga as riding on some sort of money train, and recently, they started letting third-party developers board that train as well, courtesy of their Zynga Platform partner program. Allowing partners to put their games on Zynga.com, the program seems like a good way for devs to get increased visibility and taste a little more cash themselves.

If I had just sold 10 million copies of Angry Birds Space in just three days, I’d probably want to buy myself something nice to celebrate. Rovio seems to agree with my thinking, as they’ve just announced the acquisition of Futuremark Games Studio, the gaming division of the popular PC benchmarking software company Futuremark.