TableTwister
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Real Networks' GameHouse division finds a home on the App Store
On our way around last week's CES ShowStoppers event (where we met up with none other than T-Pain), I was surprised to see that Real Networks had a booth. They were big time back in the days when RealPlayer ruled internet streaming, but these days, I haven't seen much of them around. Turns out they're still kicking, though -- in addition to the streaming services, the company has been running an acquired arcade site called GameHouse (basically the successor to the old RealArcade), and that division has been releasing games on one of our favorite platforms: the iOS App Store. Sure enough, the popular Sally's Salon game is a GameHouse title, and Tiki Towers is another popular title from the company. We were shown two new iPad games from GameHouse -- the first was called Bad Air Day, and it has a pretty nauseous premise. You play as a hotel elevator bellhop with a farting problem, and as your little guy cuts the cheese, it's the player's job to swipe the touchscreen and direct the green gas around. Aside from the bathroom premise, the game has some interesting almost physics-based gameplay, as you need to clear the gas past the customers and into a ceiling fan, or onto a fart fairy who actually likes the smell. The other game we saw was Table Twister, a word game with rotating letter tiles on a table, that requires up to four players to drag the tiles off and create words as quickly as possible. Both were simple, but fun, and they were pretty polished -- GameHouse seems to know what its doing after quite a bit of iOS experience. "Games is a core business" for the company, the representative told us. As I said, I was surprised to see the old familiar Real logo (and those of us who counted on web streaming years ago can still see it spinning in our dreams and/or nightmares) at the show, but it's interesting to know that the company is growing well on the iOS platform.
