Colourful simulation title Doctor Life, which developer WIGU Games released on iOS all the way back in February, is finally available to download for your Android-powered devices from Google Play for a limited-time price of 99c (a saving of 67%).The first time you fire up Doctor Life, you're given the keys to your very own medical practice - a small and humble clinic. Your job is to transform this clinic over time into a multi-story hospital that's large enough to treat hundreds of sick patients at once.That's not your only job, mind.Each and every patient that enters through the front doors of your hospital will exhibit real-world symptoms. Yep, you guessed it. It's also your job to correctly diagnose and successfully treat each patient based on their symptoms.Doctor Life may be colourful, but that doesn't mean it's a walk in the park. You must act fast to cure your patients and earn excellence awards, and keep an evil tycoon from buying the land that your medical centre sits on.
When you develop free-to-play games, a lot of your time is spent playing Moby Dick. Your business can live or die by the elusive whale - a gamer who's willing to spend money in your game, and spend big. In China, the story is no different. That's why it's so great to get some insight into what whales in the Chinese market look like, which is something we do this week.Thanks again to Laohu.com, the Beijing-based site that graciously provides a roundup of China's gaming news every week for the Gamezebo audience. To learn more about the Chinese gaming scene, be sure to give Laohu.com a read.
Isn't it surprising that Family Guy has made it past the 200-episode mark without an official mobile game? TinyCo has been working with the voice cast from the long-running animated show and the brand experts at Fox Digital Entertainment to rectify this oversight, and the fruits of their labor will be available to all next week when Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff launches for iOS and Android on April 10.Using the latest, particularly destructive donnybrook between Peter Griffin and Ernie The Giant Chicken as a backdrop, the game asks you to direct the Griffin family and their friends in an effort to rebuild Quahog. If that sounds like it'll have builder elements, you're probably on the right track.
Well, now we've done it. By we, I mean humans, and by done it, I mean we've taken the fight directly to the aliens responsible for invading Earth in the Anomaly series of tower offense games from 11 bit studios. For the final installment, Anomaly Defenders, there's only one thing left to do: flip everything around.Not only will you be playing as the aliens this time, you'll be doing so in what 11 bit calls the "first ever Reverse Tower Offense game." You may also know it as tower defense, but perhaps that's just a matter of semantics.In any case, you'll have to master eight types of towers, each with their own strengths and weaknesses against different human units. Research in various tech trees will allow upgrades to the damage, armor or critical hit chances of your towers, and since the humans are determined invaders, you'll have to make tactical decisions in real time instead of sitting there and letting your towers do all the work.Without learning from what 11 bit assures us will be repeated failures, the aliens will die, and apparently we care about that now. Anomaly Defenders is coming for smartphones, tablets and PC later this spring, and if you still need a reason to be properly motivated to fight against your own species, the first trailer should put you in the proper frame of mind.
Amazon pulled a Sega Saturn today (perhaps not the most auspicious comparison) and announced that you can buy the Fire TV for $99 at this very moment.The device is a clear competitor for set-top boxes like Apple TV, Chromecast and Roku. You'll be able to stream video from the obligatory services like Netflix and Hulu Plus alongside Amazon's own Instant Video apps.On the hardware end, it sports a dedicated graphics processor, 2GB of RAM and a Mimo dual-band wifi which, theoretically, makes it three times faster than those other devices I just mentioned. It also has voice control, so everyone can know when you're binge-watching Scandal as you shout it out to an empty room.What's most interesting about the little black box is how open it is. It operates on the open Android operating system, meaning it's very simple for software designers to bring content to the device in just about any way they choose. To me, that smells like a greater focus on games than its prime competitors.
If you haven't already noticed, it's April Fool's Day. Whether you figured it out by now from a bogus news article, a text from your Uncle telling you he's won the lottery, or even or our shenanigans at Gamezebo, the day is celebrated around the world as a day of kind-hearted trickery. Like Halloween but with no treats, April Fool's Day is celebrated by pretty much everyone, —from the science industry to the snack industry, no one is safe.Gamers are certainly not excluded from the fun, as evidenced by this huge list of pranks seen throughout the games industry today.
Now that March has drawn to a close, it's time to look back at the 31 days that were and see which games really managed to stand out as the best of the best. The first two months of 2014 saw some real game of the year contenders: The Banner Saga in January and Threes in February. Is March's winner of that same caliber?We consulted our Magic 8-Ball: All signs point to yes.
2048 is the #1 game on Google Play and the App Store, and that's a damned travesty.Our story starts a little over seven weeks ago. Sirvo LLC, better known as Greg Wohlwend and Asher Vollmer, released their second mobile game collaboration: Threes!. It was a great little puzzle game that had the perfect mix of addictive and charming that can help a game shoot to the top of the App Store. And it did. Seemingly within hours, this indie darling jumped to the #1 spot - and not just any #1 spot, but the #1 spot on the paid games list.Rumors of paid mobile gaming's death, it would seem, were greatly exaggerated.Or at least they would have been if it weren't for 2048.A UI designer and web developer, Gabriele Cirulli "created" 2048 in the span of a weekend. You may have noticed my use of quotation marks there. That's because, while he no doubt programmed the game and did the art, the creative process - aka developing an original idea and making it work - lays at the feet of Team Sirvo.Yes indeed: 2048 is a clone of Threes.