While everyone (with access to a Canadian iTunes account) has been furiously playing Hearthstone on their iPads this week, I've found myself thinking of similarly great strategy games that I wish I could play on my tablet. Chief among them? Scrolls.A cards-meets-combat game that debuted in beta last summer (read our early impressions here), we've been hearing rumblings of a tablet version since 2011. Those rumblings have finally turned into a roar. In an update on Scrolls.com today, Mojang's Owen Hill delivered the good news:"An iPad/tablet version of Scrolls is in the works! We've enlisted the aid of Ludosity to port Scrolls into flatter, more touchy devices. We'll have more news on this soon."This is great new for fans of Scrolls (or, really, strategy games in general). Ludosity has already wowed us once this year with Card City Nights, and their 2013 release Ittle Dew was one of our picks for the top games of the year.That wraps up your fantastic multiplayer strategy news for the day. Now get back to playing Hearthstone, you crazy kids.
Want to feel old? This summer Tetris turns 30. And like anyone entering their thirties, sometimes you just want to kiss your youth goodbye in the biggest way possible.That happened for Tetris this past weekend, when Alexey Pajitnov's puzzle classic was played on the side of The Cira Centre; a 29-storey skyscraper in Philadelphia.The massive project was undertaken by Dr. Frank Lee, a professor at Drexel University (who you might know better as the guy who put Pong on the side of The Cira Centre last year). According to a press release put out by The Tetris Company, Lee is hoping to break the Guiness World Record for Largest Architectural Video Game Display, which - you guessed it - he already holds for Pong.Playing Tetris on the side of a giant building is cool and all, but it's not half as exciting as the real story behind the first few years of the game. If you have an hour to kill, be sure to check out this great documentary for a taste of Cold War video game craziness.
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.
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.
The recently revealed MIND: Path to Thalamus is not the sort of game you'd expect from the game developer behind the popular "Warcelona" Left for Dead 2 campaign. There are no hordes of zombies trampling over one another to attack the player, or frantic gun fights in between burnt out cars and looted buildings. In fact, MIND: Path to Thalamus is essentially the polar opposite of Warcelona, as far as that game's setting is concerned.MIND: Path to Thalamus is a first-person puzzle game that puts players in control of the elements in order to solve the game's environmental puzzles. The game is currently in development for PC, and the developer, Carlos Coronado, has announced plans to bring the game to the Oculus Rift platform."I am planning to bring this game to Oculus Rift," Coronado explained on the game's Steam Greenlight page. " I think this game will be perfect for the Oculus because the gameplay is not fast or requires high flash skills or accuracy in your movement."
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.
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.