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Daily iPhone App: Age of Monsters - Rock Paper Scissors
Jeff Matsuda is the award-winning creator of the cartoon series The Batman, and while his style doesn't appeal to me personally, it is quite distinctive, and can make for some really cool looks. Matsuda has put his skills to work in Age of Monsters - Rock Paper Scissors, in which monsters battle it out rock/paper/scissors style. The gameplay is simple, yet provides a nice framework to carry out some epic, real-world RPS battles. Whether you're wagering a free lunch, who's going to take out the trash or just the honor of the participants, Age of Monsters is a good way to go. You can even play with friends asynchronously online, which is a nice bonus which works well. There's a solo training mode to get you ready for battle plus Game Center integration. Two extra monsters are offered up via in-app purchase, and I presume we'll see more in the future. As a freebie, Age of Monsters is worth a download, as the art and style really push this simple game further than it would otherwise go.
Bungie details iPad release of Crimson: Steam Pirates, coming next week
Man, after all the rumors, it almost seems expected: Bungie has finally announced its first original project for the iPad, a game called Crimson: Steam Pirates. It's due out on the iPad next week, and will let you command a steampunk crew across a turn-based battlefield, combining strategy, action, and Bungie's own polish and experience into what looks like a pretty impressive iOS game. The best news is that it's free to play -- the first chapter of the game contains eight missions, two multiplayer scenarios, and lots of extras like Bungie.net and Facebook integration. Other chapters will soon be available for $1.99, with chapter 2 coming immediately after release, and presumably more content later. For now, the app is iPad-only, which leaves us iPhone owners out of the loop, unfortunately. Still, the game looks good, and Bungie has had few bad games in its time. Stay tuned -- we should see it ready for download next Thursday.
Valve makes Team Fortress 2 free-to-play
In case you missed it last night, Valve has turned its excellent team-based shooter Team Fortress 2 into an entirely free-to-play experience, so even if you haven't picked up the game yet, you can head over to Steam right now and download and play it completely free, forever. The game was one of the biggest titles Valve brought over when Steam was made compatible with the Mac, so it's 100% OS X seaworthy -- just install Steam and you're good to get the game. Valve says it will be monetizing the title through the purchase of in-game items, but they're all cosmetic or conveniences at this point, so you only need to pay if you want to wear a fancy hat or don't want to wait to build up an item. In short, Team Fortress 2 is a great game that now anyone can download and play for free. That's reason to celebrate this weekend, so jump on in, and I'll be the Medic right behind you.
Pocket Legends offers paid content for free
Pocket Legends, I maintain, is one of iOS' best technical achievements. It's a full-featured MMO, in the style of the legendary World of Warcraft, and it's available to play for free on Apple's App Store. It's huge among a certain audience (and, in fact, I've been told that audience is even bigger on the Android side of things), but I'm surprised that even more players haven't tried this game out to see what Spacetime Studios is working on. Maybe this will help, though: to celebrate the game's one-year anniversary, Spacetime is opening up many of its normally premium content areas to all players for free. In a goofy video they made, developer Cinco Barnes says that all of the game's major premium areas will be open and playable to everyone until May 4. If you haven't taken a look at this app yet, now's a great time to do so. Pocket Legends is free in a universal version, and it's definitely worth checking out.
Android's in-app billing makes a dent: Dungeon Defenders free on Android Market
Dungeon Defenders: First Wave cost $3 when it first came out. This week, the iOS version will cost you ninety-nine cents. But if you want to play the Unreal Engine-powered tower defense game today, you can have it for free -- developer Trendy Entertainment is now leaning on Android's new in-app billing system to pay for the whole thing. We can't give Trendy all the credit, of course, as Glu Mobile's Gun Bros and Tapulous' Tap Tap Revenge 4 are doing the same thing, but to our knowledge both of them were free to play from day one. Free-to-play gaming has been a controversial proposition in the console and PC gaming space -- most publishers would just like to sell a game once, and call it a day. On phone, however, where apps are expected to be cheap, it could indeed make more sense to charge users for items and upgrades than to have users "buy" the game. Either way, we penny-pinchers are pleased as punch with the idea. PR after the break.
GDC 2011: Nexon goes kart riding on the iPhone
Nexon is a South Korea-based publisher that's basically helped create and define the idea of free-to-play, microtransaction-based MMOs around the world. While microtransactions have become popular in all kinds of game genres in the last few years (including in quite a few apps on the iPhone), Nexon pioneered the business model with popular MMO games like MapleStory and Combat Arms. The company's been saying for a while that it plans to move more into the social and mobile game spaces in the West (it already has quite a stable of mobile games in Korea). At GDC 2011 this past week, I got to see the company's first entry on the iPhone in America, a game called KartRider Rush. KartRider Rush is based on an MMO called Kart Rider that has never been brought to the West before (except for a short run in beta on the PC), but is well established in Korea. It's a cartoony kart racing game in the vein of Mario Kart, with customizable characters racing around a set of tracks. I enjoyed the game, though it is fun and simple. KartRider Rush accelerates for you, so you can either drive with a set of on-screen buttons or change the option to tilt the device. There are power-ups, like speed boosts and attacks, and races can be chaotic, with players quickly switching positions over the ride.
Ngmoco releases We City
Ngmoco has introduced its third title in the "We" series. We City arrives after We Rule and We Farm as the same kind of social simulation game. This time around, players will be building and creating their own cities, but other than the setting and the graphics, not too much has changed. Just like the other We titles, you can build farms to grow harvests (in this case, factories that build products), houses for citizens to give you rent, stores for your Plus+ friends to come and put orders in, and various types of decorations and custom items to paint your kingdom, sorry farm, sorry city as you see fit. What's called Mojo and Gro in the other two games is called Zap here, and it's available for the usual microtransactions, or some for free as you level up. Colleges are the one big innovation here -- you can build colleges and universities to do research for you, and those bits of research can unlock new buildings and items. It's kind of a shame that Ngmoco didn't go too far off of the beaten path -- especially with NimbleBit's Pocket Frogs showing that you can do different (and really fun) things with freemium, it's disappointing to see another "We" game with only the names and graphics changed out. But then again, I guess I can't blame them for going with what works. We City is available for free now on both the iPhone and the iPad. If you've played the other games, you know what you're in for, and if you've never seen Ngmoco's freemium model in action, here's your chance to check it out.
