Here's a question for everyone reading right now: if you were stranded on a deserted island for a year and could only bring three video games with you to help pass the time, which ones would you choose? I forgot to mention that the deserted island conveniently has a fully charged iPad on the beach and a higher-end gaming PC made out of coconuts and palm trees.Well as for me, I would probably bring a handful of great iOS games, a couple of my favorite Double Fine adventures, and maybe even a bundle of indie games or two as well. Okay, so I guess that was WAY more than three games. But at least it's a good thing that we're not stranded on a deserted island, and that all of these things and more are currently experiencing some awesome price cuts all across the internet!"And as always, if your deserted island happens to come with a really long extension cord or some extra-large data storage capacity, please let us know of any other gaming deals we may have missed this week down in the replies!
For the second time in less than a week, a game from an unknown game developer with sub-par graphics and simplistic gameplay has rocketed to the top of Apple's App Store charts.Red Bouncing Ball Spikes has arisen from nowhere to take the number paid app position in Apple's App Store, blowing our minds away and making us wonder what in the heck is happening. Unlike Flappy Bird whose popularity can be explained partly by social media, the rise of Red Bouncing Ball Spikes is far curious and suspicious.
As any editor working in the mobile space will tell you, we get a lot of emails every week pitching us new games. It's well into the hundreds, and - for obvious reasons - we can't cover everything. As a result, it takes something really special to catch our eye.The following sentence from Miles Tilmann of Pixeljam is the very definition of that something special: "It's a hybrid of Galaga-style shoot em' up, simple platforming action and Saturday morning cartoon."If that description doesn't get your blood pumping, you must not have any blood left to pump... which is fine, because if you're not looking forward to Glorkian Warrior, you're dead to me already. (KIDDING! You know we love you. Don't stop reading Gamezebo.)
We still don't really know how Flappy Bird went from obscurity to celebrity seemingly overnight - the number of theories I've read this week would put the JFK conspiracy to shame. Beyond that, though, there's been another question we've quietly been pondering. Has the game's instant notoriety translated into any real cash for creator Dong Nguyen?It has, it turns out. And it's a lot.In an interview with The Verge, Nguyen has revealed that the game has been raking in $50,000 a day. How? Advertising. Just… advertising. Flappy Bird has no in-app purchases, no premium version - it doesn't even cross-promote the developers other titles. Every single dollar that Flappy Bird has made has come from classic, old school, relatively crude in-app advertising.And it's working really well.
In the midst of their recent financial woes, Nintendo is currently looking at a great state of transition, or as others might even call it, a great state of turmoil. So to help get themselves out of this rut, the Mushroom Kingdom creators have been slowly investigating other areas of the industry, including the potential of game development on tablets and smartphones: something that most mobile gamers have been dying to hear for quite a while now.Maybe it's because of their bright and colorful worlds, or their quirky characters and lighthearted stories, but the general consensus has been that Nintendo games would just go hand-in-hand with the nature of mobile gaming. Well I'm not so sure."The last time we heard from the "Will they, won't they?" campaign, Nintendo has reiterated once again that the company will NOT be making their own mobile games going forward (but might still use the platform for certain kinds of game demos). However, they also recently announced their intentions to begin licensing some of Nintendo's biggest video game properties to outside parties, in addition to experimenting with a new operating system that would function in a similar way to what we have now with iOS or Android. And then of course, there's the whole spiel on potentially making educational Mario games on a Nintendo-manufactured Android tablet.
Unless you like to play your favorite mobile games while running on a treadmill, the odds are that your fingers are going to be the only things working to aid in your various quests to save the human race from all sorts of bad guys. So in that case, you'd better get those pinkies and pointer fingers in tip-top shape before tonight, because there's going to be oh so much world-saving action to perform right at those very fingertips.Most of tonight's new iOS releases are all about the action side of gaming: from dodging colorful blocks at warp speeds, to saving the world with a fleet of triangular spaceships, to commanding some heavily-armed kitties on a few deadly spaceships of their own. So now that you know exactly where all of the action is going down tonight, it's time to get those fingers moving on your keyboard and let us know which games you're most excited for in the comments section below!"
Ever since Flappy Bird became the #1 free game on the App Store and Google Play, developers have been wrestling with one question: How in the world did this happen?The answer should be both encouraging and discouraging for the games industry. The good news is that the dream is still alive for the indie developer. The bad news is that the entire foundation on which the multi-billion mobile games industry has been built on just maybe complete nonsense.I just got back from two mobile game conferences in the UK where experts from all over the world talked about the keys to success to creating a hit mobile game. The experts and topics were the exact same that I have seen at the mobile game conferences that occur just about every other week here in San Francisco.
Episodic games are all the rage this season, and the odds are good that you're probably somewhere in the middle of playing one right now. Almost all of the big story-driven mobile games are adopting the episodic formula these days, with most recent examples like In Fear I Trust and République just getting started with their own respective journeys. On the surface, making an episodic game is a great idea. You get to put the first installment out into the world up front and gauge your players' feedback before fine-tuning the episodes that follow. But there's one potential risk that could actually end up harming these pre-planned episodic games: the lengthy and sometimes unavoidable delays or wait times between each individual episode.Take Telltale Games for example, the studio that effectively brought the idea of episodic games into the mainstream of our industry. "Faith," the first episode of Telltale's The Wolf Among Us, was originally released for PC on October 11, 2013, and with the second episode "Smoke and Mirrors" finally debuting this week, this puts the amount of wait time between these two episodes at just under four months. At this rate, we may very well have to wait until early 2015 to see how Bigby Wolf's adventure ends: especially considering the crazy amount of new projects that Telltale has decided to juggle all at once."There are a number of reasons for varying delays in releasing the subsequent installments of an episodic game, and none of them are exactly ideal for the studio, or for the player, at that. Over the last few weeks, you could almost feel the growing frustration of gamers towards The Wolf Among Us everywhere online, with some early Season Pass adopters even afraid they might never get the next portion of the game they already paid for. And for those that do start playing Episode 2 this week, will you have a hard time picking up where you left off after such an extensive break?