If a documentary is meant to provide an objective view of real-life stories, Free to Play is an utter failure. It's a puff piece -- a bit of advertising meant to show the positive influence of a product.Free to Play is a "documentary" about Dota 2 made by Valve, the proprietors of Dota 2. As a result you shouldn't really expect it to provide a negative or even balanced depiction of their own product and, more specifically, esports.Snippets of match announcers and interviews with team managers constantly drive home just how big, how swift, how valid professional gaming has become. It may be true; I quite enjoy it myself, so I can't entirely deny that it's something worth exploring. However, it's a story that's perhaps best not taken at face value from the people who stand to profit most.Of course, that doesn't mean the stories on display are bad, or the film itself uninteresting. In fact, it's a quite well-put-together little piece that provides a fascinating, if not particularly fair, view of three young people exploring a new form of entertainment.
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.
Last year, game developer Might and Delight released one of the most emotionally conflicting games I've ever played. Shelter was an adorable little game about raising a little badger family and escorting your cubs through the wilderness. But Shelter also dealt with just how unforgiving and cruel Mother Nature is for cute little animals. I lost one cub in the darkness of the night, never to find it again; I accidently let one cub starve to death as I lost track of which cubs were eating enough; and I watched the rest of them get washed away in a flash flood. I was a horrible badger mother.Hopefully I'll be a slightly better Lynx mother. Earlier in the week, Might and Delight announced that Shelter 2 will start players off as a pregnant Lynx, working to prepare a den for her incoming babies. One of the biggest differences between the first and second games is that Shelter 2 won't be a linear experience, like its predecessor was. Instead, players will be able to venture out from the den and explore the nearby areas, returning to the den at anytime they wish to. A stamina system is also being added into Shelter 2, perhaps necessitating timely returns to the den after a set amount of time out exploring.
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.
iPhone and iPad games sometimes launch early in specific regions - usually for those lucky ragamuffins living Canada, New Zealand or Australia. Many online-centric mobile games dance the staggered release routine to stress test servers and catch various other problems before launching in countries like the ol' U.S. of A.Not to fret, dear readers. Much like subsidized health insurance, you too can experience the same wonders as Canada just by setting up a spare Apple ID on your iDevice of choice with these few simple steps. These instructions will work on any free-to-play game in any country you may need, though Canada seems the region of choice for most developers.
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.
Strategy gamers, prepare yourselves for a double dose of fun. Two of the best-loved PC games of the last few years have just hit the iPad, and both games seems as if they were designed from the ground-up with tablets in mind (and in the case of Hearthstone, it really was!)FTL is a spaceship management roguelike-like that send players on a trip through the galaxy, on a quest to survive as long as they can. It was incredibly well-received in its 2012 debut (and earned four stars here at Gamezebo), but the iPad version took its sweet time coming out. Why? Because this is the debut of FTL: Advanced Edition.If you already own the PC version, Advanced Edition is available as a free expansion today as well - and it brings oodles and oodles of changes. I could list them here, but why bother when the developer has done a great job of it right here?