hive
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Hands-on impressions of The Secret World
Last month, Funcom held a special hands-on event for The Secret World at its Montreal, Canada offices, where we sent freelancer François Blondin to cover all the exciting details. François also got to play the game for several hours, giving us a fresh perspective on what TSW has to offer MMO gamers. In Funcom's upcoming The Secret World, the game's three factions -- Templars, Illuminati and Dragons -- face off, compete, and collaborate (all at the same time!) amidst the nightmarish creatures being revealed throughout the world. But choose your allegiance carefully: Your faction determines your path and special bonuses for the whole game, and faction-switching won't be an option. Join me for a hands-on look at the game's current incarnation!%Gallery-72395%
Honey, at home: Philips urban beehive shrinks your ecological footprint, increases holes on belt
It's a first-world issue: running out of honey when we need just a little more to sweeten up that bowl of oatmeal or cup of coffee. What we need is a constant supply of the golden stuff, and Philips has thankfully come up with this urban beehive to provide precisely that. It's the latest addition to the company's germaphobe-unfriendly "microbial home" concept. The system is half flowerpot, half hive, with bees able to travel between flower pollination and your domestic honey factory their honeycomb house. Honey can be 'tapped' from the base, with a smoking system in place to "calm the bees" before opening the hive. Now, if Philips could fashion something to keep us in a constant supply of maple syrup, then maybe even bakery dreams have a future, after all. %Gallery-139021%
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Pragmatica
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, we unlock HiVE's apocalyptic puzzler, Pragmatica. What's your game called, and what's it about? This is Pragmatica. It's a programming-based puzzler set in a not-too-distant future, in which robots have, somewhat controversially, all but replaced humans as the world's industrial labour force. The largest and most powerful robotics firm, Pragmatica, hires you as a programmer, tasking you with writing programs to solve tasks using their expensive and highly volatile robots. Gameplay-wise, this means combine actions and conditions (SEE-WALL, TURN-RIGHT) into a program, then hitting the launch button and watching the robots execute it to complete the task, or crash and burn trying.
Review: Hive board game app offers all sorts of buggy fun
As a tabletop board game, Hive has been around since 2001. It draws inspiration from classic abstract strategy games like chess and shogi but does away with that pesky board (see also: Tile Chess). The iPhone/iPod touch app [US$1.99, iTunes link] brings everything from the physical version to your pocket, and if clever placement of bug-decorated pieces is your thing, the game is well worth the download – at least for a short while. The Game The rules of this two-player game are entirely simple. Each turn, you either add a piece to the hive (you can think of the hive as the board) or, if you've already placed your queen bee, you can move a piece in the hive. The object of the game is to surround your opponent's bee and, like in chess, each type of piece (different kinds of bugs) has its own movement abilities, so knowing when to move where is a challenge and certainly part of the fun. Beetles climb on other bugs, the ant runs around the hive, and so on.The full rules are detailed in the app's tutorial, or you can watch a video review after the jump (or get the rules PDF). Read on to discover if these bugs are the kind you want invading your iPhone. %Gallery-84698%
The titles you may have missed
Cheap-Ass Gamer made an important observation: the DS just had far too many AAA titles in 2006 for its own good. Amongst the chaos and personal financial destruction of games like New Super Mario Bros, Metroid Prime: Hunters, Final Fantasy III, and Brain Age, it was quite easy to miss some of the gems hidden in the rough. Thus, CAG has made a list of games you might want to go back and visit as the holiday game rush ends (though not really ... Phoenix Wright 2 comes out this month and is certainly your first priority). Check it out, and discover the lost.
