If flinging turds at island invaders hasn’t helped you get out your pent up aggressions, help is on the way. Soon you will be able to use a spiky catapult to fling cows at angry Englishmen in flimsy wooden huts, all on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. This is thanks to the popular physics puzzler, Monty Python Cow Tossing.
The game seems to be loosely based on the popular Angry Birds, but it has several additional features. For example, there are Holy Grail and other power-ups on each of the 80 levels of the game. You can also purchase upgrades for your catapult and use different types of animals for throwing, including the African swallow.
Monty Python Cow Tossing will be available for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and select mobile handsets in the next few weeks. No price has yet been released.
Oh joy of joys! There goes my productivity down the drain. Blue Fang Games has just announced two secret projects they’ll be releasing on Facebook soon: Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail. These games are both timeless and branded so hard it’s a rare occasion to meet anyone who grew up in the United States between 1971 and now that doesn’t know of their existence. And you know what else? Oregon Trail is 40 this year. Fourty years of broken axels, forging rivers, and dysentery. Joy!
An odd thing about this news is that it was announced earlier than today – take a peek at this City Pages article from last week, mostly about the creators of the original game (Minnesotans all,) with a tiny note near the end about how the game will be joining Facebook soon. Today the news clip comes from Darius Kazemi, Lead Analyst at Blue Fang Games, a group of developers that’s working with The Learning Company to produce both Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego for Facebook. Oregon Trail will be released February 2nd, and Carmen Sandiego will be released February 9th.
We’re used to seeing all sorts of funky motion-based games on smartphones, but here’s something a little bit different: a retro-themed desktop 3D flash game that utilises your iOS device as an accelerometer and gyroscope-based wireless controller. The objective of kijjaa! is simple: just fly your vessel around, shoot down or avoid the enemies, and pick up extra lives. Don’t worry, there’s no jailbreaking involved here — all we had to do was visit kijjaa.com/air, and then copy the code onto our iOS app to establish the link via WiFi or 3G.
There’s no serious challenge in kijjaa! — based on the app’s description on iTunes, the game’s designed with students and office workers in mind, so it’s ideal for those seeking a fun quickie during their short breaks. We’d say the hardest part is trying to dodge the ghosts that show up randomly in short notice, but what really annoyed us were the occasional control lags that popped up even over WiFi. Still, for a promotional $0.99 pricing (the 70 percent price drop ends on January 17th has been extended to January 24th), this game has gone much further than most other games have, and it’ll only get better — already in the pipeline are Game Center support, new enemies, new bonuses, and achievements. Hopefully the developer will also throw in some more chiptune soundtracks as well. Demo video after the break — it kinda makes you want this on the Apple TV too, doesn’t it?
There’s no shortage of applications out there to demonstrate the potential of Verizon’s 4G LTE network, but Electronic Arts’ just showed off one of the more impressive ones to date at its CES 2011 press conference. It demoed its forthcoming Rock Band Mobile game for Android, which will let up to four players “jam together over the network,” making it the first game that can be played with friends over the network at launch. Not much more than that to go on at the moment, but we’re certainly eager to try this one out for ourselves.
Update: Press release is after the break with the complete track listing. Jethro Tull is headed to 4G.
Today at CES, Mophie showed off a prototype of its Pulse game grip for the 4th-generation iPod touch, which features battery-powered front-facing stereo speakers and haptic feedback by Reflex Technology. We spent some time using the Pulse and came away rather impressed. Game audio, music, and even the keyboard tick sound get translated into convincing pulses and vibrations. The iPod touch interfaces with the Pulse via the 3.5mm headphone jack, and a switch on the bottom left edge turns the haptic feedback on and off. As a bonus, the Pulse also offers full case protection. No word yet on availability or pricing, but you can check out the prototype in the gallery below.
If you know anything about the history of video games, you know about one of the most maddeningly addictive action puzzle games of all time: Frogger. What you might not know is that this sort of game has been played by real people more than once – most recently just a couple of days ago in South Carolina by a man and his friends. He didn’t exactly get crunched, but he didn’t really make it all the way across, either, getting hit by a Lexus SUV on his way across. This should remind you of two relatively famous reenactments of similar nature: Seinfeld and the Prodigy. Their respective games (or terrible lapses in judgement) went way better (or funnier, at least.)
This man and his friends, according to Clemson police chief Jimmy Dixon, were “intrigued” by the idea that they might act out the game Frogger in real life. When his friend shouted “Go!” this man started his way across several lanes of traffic – getting quickly hit, but not killed. WYFF 4 local news reports the man to be in stable condition.
Now lets talk about the better situations. First of two is Seinfeld, in an episode where they’ve got an arcade cabinet containing the Frogger game that George would like to get across the street to a power outlet to try out. He decides for the most hilarious approach and dodges traffic:
The more hardcore of these two involves lots of voodoo magic. This is a music video of the Pendulum remix of the classic Prodigy song “Voodoo People” and features a ritualistic running of blindfolded people through a series of obstacles, including traffic. Make sure your sound is down to a reasonable level for this one:
In case you had any preconceptions that you were going to be able to put down your phone long enough to greet friends and family members this holiday weekend… well, think again, because Dungeon Defenders: First Wave — built atop Unreal Engine 3 — is now available on Android. Tegra 2 devices like the Optimus 2X are billed as the “best” choices for playing the game, but seeing how those aren’t really available, your next best options are Samsung’s Hummingbird-based phones including the Galaxy Tab, Galaxy S series, and the Nexus S. A patch to be released next month will allow players to interact with their iOS-sporting counterparts online, while those on Tegra-based devices will get the opportunity to play with folks on PCs sometime later in the first quarter. Grab it now for $2.99; follow the break for the full press release.
One of the hottest titles in the App Store right now — id Software’s Rage — recently got a healthy official update to version 1.11 that adds a handful of big new features to its roster, perfect to add a little replay value just in time as your amazing graphics-induced euphoria wears off. What’s new? Well, the biggest new feature might be support for Apple’s Game Center, offering achievements and scoreboards. You’ve also got gyroscope support — good only if you’re using an iPhone 4, of course — that offers an orientation-controlled aiming mode, and official TV-out support for upsizing your gameplay onto the big screen. There’s apparently also a new “museum mode” that lets you stroll through the game world without troublesome baddies trying to attack you for those occasions when you’re looking for a more peaceful form of entertainment… not exactly fit for a title named “Rage,” really.
One of the hottest titles in the App Store right now — id Software’s Rage — recently got a healthy official update to version 1.11 that adds a handful of big new features to its roster, perfect to add a little replay value just in time as your amazing graphics-induced euphoria wears off. What’s new? Well, the biggest new feature might be support for Apple’s Game Center, offering achievements and scoreboards. You’ve also got gyroscope support — good only if you’re using an iPhone 4, of course — that offers an orientation-controlled aiming mode, and official TV-out support for upsizing your gameplay onto the big screen. There’s apparently also a new “museum mode” that lets you stroll through the game world without troublesome baddies trying to attack you for those occasions when you’re looking for a more peaceful form of entertainment… not exactly fit for a title named “Rage,” really.
Aww, would you look at that, the iPhone’s trying to play big boy games! Following in the well received footsteps of Rage HD, today marks the debut of Infinity Blade, the second in what’s hopefully a wave of gorgeous-looking iOS games boasting advanced 3D graphics, if not 3D gameplay. Epic Games has put aside the chainsaw-equipped projectile weaponry of its wildly successful Gears of War console series to deliver the first mobile game built around its Unreal Engine 3. You won’t be surprised to hear that it’s utterly delicious to look at, and the visuals certainly helped transport us to this alien realm of swords, axes, shields, and magical rings — where body armor is optional, but helmets apparently are not. Jump past the break to see this visual feast in motion and to soak up some more of our impressions.
