Having already tackled the worlds of physics-based puzzle games, kart racing, animation, plush toys and more, you'd think there were few frontiers left for Rovio left to conquer with the Angry Birds brand. And apparently, you'd be wrong.The next game in the seemingly unstoppable franchise is on the way, and in a move sure to make people everywhere do double takes, it's a turn-based RPG with a crafting system. Angry Birds Epic is its name, and the always fortunate folks in Canada and Australia will be able to play it this week before it invades iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8 devices worldwide later this year."It sounds like the crafting will tie in with the game's monetization, as TechCrunch's Darrell Etherington says players will be able to use in-app purchases to help make weapons and armor. A bigger question might be what birds would even use to make gear. Can you grab an old hubcap to use as a shield or fashion really pointy sticks into arrows?
"Less is more." It's something we say all the time, but how often do we actually think about what it means?Greg Wohlwend has considered it more than most people. As an artist on games like Ridiculous Fishing, Hundreds and, more recently, Threes!, it's his job to make the games you play pleasing to look at. But sometimes the best designs are the simplest, and that's not just aesthetics."At one point we tried broccoli and cheese soup as a theme," Wohlwend said during our interview. "You had broccoli, then you had cheese and so those are your ones and twos. Then you create soup. And maybe you create more soup. That's obviously, as I say it, a horrible idea."Like previous games Wohlwend has worked on, Threes! is very minimalist. It's about sliding together numbers to add and multiply one another. On its face, that's hardly the most exciting subject matter for an artist to tackle. So Greg, along with his co-developer Asher Vollmer, looked for more distinct designs: from broccoli and cheese soup, to military ranks, textile patterns and hydrogen atoms.Over the game's year and a half of development, the duo went through something like two dozen themes. None of them worked.
Back in 2011, Namco had a very bright idea: create a team to breathe new life into some of their long-forgotten franchises and characters. ShiftyLook was born out of this idea, and through a series of webcomics (and games and other media), they succeeded admirably at their mission.But now, like the characters they were tasked to resurrect, ShiftyLook is destined to fall into obscurity; a soon to be distant memory."Now that we have successfully revived so many franchises," reads the latest update on the ShiftyLook website, "the heavy lifting is completed - and so is our work. We battled the video games abyss and won, which means it's time for us to move on and let the hit-makers play with some new toys."The early retirement of ShiftyLook spells a similar fate for many of its creations. Namco High, a fantastic dating sim/interactive fiction release that earned a near perfect score in our review last year, will have its servers shut down on Jun 30, 2014. Their mobile game BRAVOMAN: Binja Bash! will be suffering a similar fate, disappearing from iTunes, Google Play and Amazon at the end of this month.
Few games or creators have ever managed to upset the status quo in the way Flappy Bird and Dong Nguyen did. The game skyrocketed to #1 with zero marketing, earned its creator hundreds of thousands of dollars, and disappeared from the App Store due to a sense of ethics and responsibility; the game was simply too addictive, its creator said.Asides from a few tweets and a whole lot of speculation, though, we've had little to go in in terms of what really happened with Flappy Bird - or to its creator Dong Nguyen. But now, thanks to an interview with Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, we have the whole story."If you have even the slightest bit of interest in the phenomenon that was Flappy Bird, you owe it to yourself to check out the whole article. That said, here are a few highlights of what we learned;
For something that sounds like one part anarchist fantasy and one part doomed idealism, Bitcoin has defied a lot of odds in the last few months. A virtual currency that exists without government support (and in some parts of the world is straight up illegal), it's been embraced by a number of names in the gaming world.Some of those names, like Apps for Coins, are small players that have sprung up as part of a cottage industry around Bitcoin buyers - but those names aren't going to stay small for long. Zynga started experimenting with Bitcoins back in January, and now a similarly big name is casual gaming, Big Fish Games, has partnered with Coinbase to offer the currency as a viable alternative to their more common payment options."Being able to offer bitcoin payments to our consumers through Coinbase is just one more way Big Fish is meeting demand and setting the pace for the mainstream consumer and for the mainstream industry," Big Fish CEO Paul Thelen said in today's press release. "This is not a test, this payment method will be available worldwide for all of Big Fish PC and Mac games in the Big Fish app store."
Art is stupid. Bears are awesome. You might disagree with one (or both) of these statements, but you know who doesn't care? Halfbrick. The makers of Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, and Colossatron are about to take the art world by storm - by tearing it apart with Rory the Bear.The next game from Australia's mobile masters is Bears vs. Art, their "first true puzzle game," according a press release issued today. And thanks to an early launch in Australia and Canada, you don't have to go by the press release alone.The object of the game is to destroy the art in 125 galleries by taking the shortest route possible (while avoiding a multitude on security measures). Mostly because bears are awesome.There's no date yet on a worldwide release, but with a soft launch already live, we don't imagine you'll have to wait too long to get grizzly on a Picasso.
With new console launches from Sony and Microsoft mere months in the rear view mirror, we won't blame you if you buy into the hype and consider 2014 to be a golden age for gaming machines; a veritable Renaissance for living room gaming. But the endless TV ads and Best Buy displays that are selling you this fantasy are devoid of one thing: sales numbers. And as TechCrunch has reported today, they're not good.Referring to leaked NPD data on North American console sales for January 2014, TechCrunch paints a fairly dismal picture for the living room market as a whole - one in which only 16 million next gen consoles have sold to date. At fault, in their opinion, are a myriad of factors - including casual gamers moving to mobile and hardcore gamers moving to PC.As the editor of a site primarily focused on mobile and PC gaming, I hate to say I told you so, but… you're gonna let me have this one, right?
Back in January, Gamezebo's interview with Disruptor Beam CEO and founder Jon Radoff revealed that Game of Thrones Ascent was headed to mobile. The big question was when, but the company kind of answered that today: early spring, close to the time when Season 4 of the TV show gets rolling on HBO.Disruptor Beam isn't going it alone either. Following up on a partnership formed for the popular web version of the game, it's teaming with Kongregate to bring Game of Thrones Ascent to both iOS and Android."Since the early stages of the game's development, our intention was always to release Game of Thrones Ascent on mobile devices," Radoff said in a press release. "Now that we have had great success growing users and revenue across web platforms, we are excited to be bringing the game to mobile players. That's what we've seen first-hand with Kongregate, and why we are excited about partnering with them for our mobile release, continuing to build upon this vast and passionate community of players."Kongregate is best known as on online games portal, but it did announce a $10 million mobile publishing initiative last year. It's also owned by GameStop, which should help when it comes to marketing the arrival of Ascent on mobile devices.