Fruit Ninja
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Apple Arcade adds over 30 games and a 'greatest hits' section
Apple Arcade has expanded to 180-plus games, including a mix of App Store classics like 'Monument Valley' and 'Fruit Ninja.'
Fruit Ninja to see major overhaul in next mobile update
Hit produce-gutting action game Fruit Ninja will soon see a major update across iOS and Android platforms adding several new gameplay elements and unlockables, developer Halfbrick announced this week. "The team has thrown away the tired menu and UI designs, ensuring the steps between playing, equipping new gear, and using social features are all streamlined," Halfbrick said in a recent statement. "Now, almost every item will have a unique effect on gameplay, which has effectively broken the score ceiling and added an exponential amount of depth and strategy to slicing." The update allows players to pair unlockable Blades and Dojos for various game-altering effects, similar to the gameplay structure adopted by the studio's endless runner Jetpack Joyride. The new "Great Wave" dojo spawns large groups of fruit during each session, for instance, while the Autumn Blade summons a screen-clearing tornado after players slice a pineapple. Fruit Ninja's update is slated to launch in October. [Image: Halfbrick]
ESRB rates Fruit Ninja Kinect 2 for Xbox One
The ESRB has issued a content rating for the unannounced Fruit Ninja Kinect 2, suggesting that a sequel to Halfbrick's fruit-eviscerating action game will soon find its way to the Xbox One. The Australian Classification Board outed the follow-up in a rating issued last month. Neither developer Halfbrick nor publisher Microsoft has issued a statement confirming the game's existence or upcoming release. Prior to its Xbox 360 Kinect debut in 2011, Fruit Ninja was a hit on mobile platforms, topping the App Store sales charts and spawning the animated film-based spinoff Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots. Teetotalers beware: the ESRB warns that Fruit Ninja Kinect 2 features oblique references to alcohol in on-screen text descriptions like "In Eastern Africa you can buy banana beer." Scandalous! [Image: Halfbrick]
Halfbrick giving away its iOS games for a limited time, even Fruit Ninja
The game developers at Halfbrick have created a large catalog of fun, quirky iOS games over the last four years that span a wide range of genres and tastes. You want to kill waves of zombies in adorable fashion? Age of Zombies is right there for you. Fantasize about destroying fruit like a martial arts master? Fruit Ninja turns your fingers into swords. Maybe you're a casual gamer who just wants to help jumping fish fight against an ever-changing climate? Fish Out of Water! is ready to fill that need. And now, for a limited time, you can fill those needs for free. Normally Halfbrick's game's are $0.99, meaning you'd need $10 to try them all, but for a limited time the company is giving away all their titles for free. Age of Zombies, Band Stars, Birzzle Fever, Colossatron: Massive World Threat, Fish Out of Water!, Fruit Ninja (even HD), Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots, Jetpack Joyride, and Monster Dash. You can download the whole collection here. While the sale is just short term, it would make sense for Halfbrick to make this their standard pricing. Each title features in-app purchases for new weapons, costumes, and bonuses; purchases that make sense once you've found yourself addicted to a title. Thankfully each of these games is a blast to play even if you never lay down any extra coin to buy power ups, so head over to the App Store and download these titles before you have to pay for them. Here's a video Halfbrick released to promote the sale. This sale is only for iOS, but maybe if your friends who use Android ask nicely, you'll let them play on your iPhone.
Fruit Ninja, Open Me! squeeze onto Vita this week
There are a couple of Vita surprises in this week's PSN update for North America, surprise being a befitting quality for both. As revealed on the PlayStation Blog, sales phenomenon Fruit Ninja will creep onto the Sony portable's PS Store tomorrow, joined by augmented reality puzzler Open Me!. Details on the Vita's version of slice-and-dicer Fruit Ninja are currently sparse, maybe indicating a fairly straight port of the iOS and Android HD iterations. We've reached out to developer Halfbrick Studios for more info. As for Open Me!, we knew it was coming to North America sometime this year, having first been unveiled in Japan last year. We went hands-on with the curious game at last year's Tokyo Games Show, grappling with how to pry open its AR-displayed boxes, locked away by puzzles guarded with vicious-looking traps - think Fireproof's The Room, but meaner. Open Me! also has a co-op mode for two Vitas, each player seeing and interacting with the same AR puzzle but from their own perspective. As for what secrets are locked within the boxes of Open Me!, we've no idea - maybe it's more godly powers. The PlayStation Blog also confirmed the rest of this week's PSN releases, which we'll briefly run through. Payday 2, Mars: War Logs, Thunder Wolves and Ducktales Remastered are all headed to PS3, while the Vita also gets Breakquest freemium follow-up Extra Evolution, and old-school puzzler A-Men, finally coming to North America after being available in Europe since the Vita's launch in February 2012.
Australian government invests in game industry to halt job migration
Australia's government-funded Screen Australia program plans on investing $20 million into the local video game industry. Gamasutra reports the organization will spend $4-5 million on games production and $2-3 million on supporting business sustainability over the next year.The organization cites the American-owned Firemonkeys, studio-killing LA Noire and Halfbrick (Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride) as successful signs of Australian-developed games – hey, one legit shout-out to Halfbrick out of three ain't bad.Australia has had to spend the past several years reinventing its place in the video game industry. Unfavorable exchange rates for foreign investors caused major publishers to pull console game development out of the country, causing severe job losses over a three-year period. The region has found success focusing on the mobile market.
All Halfbrick games free on App Store now
Go buy every Halfbrick game on the App Store, for your iPhone or iPad. We don't normally make such direct demands on our readers' finances, but as it turns out, this won't affect your finances much.For a "very limited time," all Halfbrick games on iPhone or iPad are free. That includes stuff like Fruit Ninja, Age of Zombies, Jetpack Joyride, and Monster Dash. Halfbrick games are among the most clever and addictive pastimes on the iOS platform. We'd recommend them even at nonzero prices!
Daily iPad App: Jack Lumber goes chop socky on trees
Sega has just started publishing other developers' games on the App Store through an initiative called Sega Alliance with Jack Lumber, a game by the folks who made Smuggle Truck (or Snuggle Truck, if you caught it post-censorship). This is a title that's heavily inspired by the great Fruit Ninja, but instead of just ripping off Halfbrick's apple-slicing classic, it actually iterates forward on that game quite a bit. For one thing, instead of just slicing through the air as quickly as you can, Jack Lumber will actually pause and slow down the logs you're meant to be cutting through, which lets you set up a little more strategy to your slices. You can cut through multiple logs in one swipe for bonus points, and some logs have to be cut in a certain directly, or chopped twice for maximum points. The game's great fun, and the goofy "Trees killed my grandma" cartoon aesthetic goes a long way towards making the game really colorful and interesting. If you like Fruit Ninja, Jack Lumber is a must buy, and even if you're looking for something new from a line-drawing game, this one's well worth a look. Sega definitely started off its publishing choices right. Jack Lumber is universal and available from the App Store now for just 99 cents. Edit: A previous version of the post listed the wrong publisher. Apologies for any confusion.
Visualized: what your screen looks like after 22 straight hours of Fruit Ninja
Twenty-two and a half hours, actually. Qualcomm's gaming marathon is nearing its end right now. Thirty-two gamers set out to break the Guinness world record for the "longest video game marathon on a tablet" at 2:30PM PT yesterday -- when we popped in this afternoon, 26 were still standing (well, sitting), a couple having fallen to that human weakness that is sleep. Those Galaxy Tabs that were still in use, however, had certainly seen better days. More photos of the event, which caps off at 4:30PM PT today, in the gallery below. All of these overtired gamers are competing for a grand prize of $20,000 -- more than enough to buy a nice new screen shammy.
ASUS enlists BlueStacks to run Android apps on Windows PCs, skips all the OS juggling
Turns out that you won't have to buy a Transformer AiO and use two whole operating systems to run Android apps on that ASUS Windows PC -- the Taiwan PC builder has struck a deal to run Bluestacks' App Player for key software on the ASUS@Vibe side of its new Open Cloud Computing service. The code layer will give free rein to play games like Fruit Ninja or Defender as well as run more sober titles like Evernote and Pulse. Apps will be available across every type of PC ASUS makes, including Eee PC netbooks and other models without touchscreens, but they won't always be gratis. ASUS is providing free Android apps for just the first six months of service and will be charging an unspecified rate for unlimited access afterwards, so you may want to opt for that Transformer AiO or a PadFone to run mobile apps the old-fashioned way.
Fruit Ninja celebrates 2-year anniversary with new powerups, free iOS codes
Fruit Ninja might not really need updating – it's pretty feature-complete if there is fruit for you to slice, and you can slice it – but Halfbrick is adding content to the mobile game anyway in honor of its two-year anniversary. The new update will be live May 24.Gutsu and Truffles join the cast (in other words, Sensei), bringing with them a shop where you can purchase powerups that add time, deflect bombs, or explode, in exchange for Starfruit, a new currency that you earn in-game.Speaking of currency, Halfbrick is handing out the iPhone game at no cost right now on its anniversary website. The offer is limited, but we'd be surprised if this Starfruit update weren't leading into an optional microtransaction-based system like that in Jetpack Joyride.
Padzilla Two mates iPad and Kinect for Fruit Ninja madness
If you've ever wanted to see what a cross between an iPad and a Kinect would result in, Crunchy Logistics just unveiled its Padzilla Too video display that utilizes both. The bound-to-be pricey display projects what Crunchy Logistics claims is the largest reproduction of the iPad in the world onto a wall. The 24-feet wide and 12-feet tall iPad screen, constructed with 3.5mm LED wall matrix display technology, can be controlled by Kinect gestures. Check out the video below. How long do you think it'll take before we see a giant game of Angry Birds taking place? [Via The Verge]
Amazon Appstore for Android celebrates a year of life, deals for a week
Whatever Google can do, Amazon can do... too? Sure seems it, as the latter is celebrating a rather momentous occasion by giving back to the people that have brought it this far: you (and you, and you!). The Amazon Appstore for Android has officially been alive and kicking for 12 months, and Bezos and co. are slashing prices for a week instead of tossing one forgettable party. We're told to expect rock-bottom rates on iconic titles such as Fruit Ninja, Wolfram Alpha, Splashtop Remote Desktop, Dr. Seuss's The Shape of Me and Other Stuff, TuneIn Radio Pro, TETRIS, PAC-MAN, The Lost City, MONOPOLY, AccuWeather Platinum and more. Birthday deals start today with one of the top paid apps, Plants vs. Zombies, at 67 percent off, and you can expect to see more in the coming days. Crack open that dusty wallet and hit the source link, vaquero.
Halfbrick working on new iOS game, 1.3 update for Jetpack Joyride
Halfbrick Studios' Phil Larsen is a happy guy. Not only has his company scored a huge hit with Fruit Ninja (with over a million copies sold on Xbox Kinect alone), but the studio's Jetpack Joyride is a hit as well, garnering over 19 million across various free and paid incarnations. Halfbrick, says Larsen, is working on a new IP for iOS that we'll see by the end of the year. Until then, the group is working Jetpack Joyride version 1.3, which introduces an entirely new feature: Gadgets. Gadgets are perks that can be added to Barry's jetpack. They're purchased with coins picked up during play (which ties in to the game's in-app purchase system) and tweak the gameplay in several ways. For example, the "Freeze-o-matic" allows Barry to slide farther when he dies. The "Flying Pig" turns slot machine coins into pigs that explode into fireworks of rewards, and a gadget called "Gemology" converts coins into gems, which give five times the reward when collected. You can have three gadgets running at a time, and when they're all combined, they can either help a lot (by making some very challenging missions relatively easy), or make the game crazier than ever. Gadgets aren't just add-ons to the jetpack. They affect the game in several ways, which Larsen says will allow Halfbrick to expand the game a lot going forward. Fifteen gadgets will be introduced when the update goes live, with more coming after that. "We can definitely support this game lots more." I asked Larsen about the Jetpack Joyride knockoffs on the App Store. Larsen shrugged them off. "They're not as good as Jetpack Joyride, so why bother?" he asked with a smirk. Halfbrick is an independent company, though obviously it's been growing, even as the Australian game economy is in a downturn. Larsen says the developer has about 57 employees right now, and given the games' popularity, they could stand to grow a bit more. But Larsen also says Halfbrick isn't interested in being purchased by a larger developer, either. Of course there have been offers, but in the end, he says, "We like what we do." Taking a deal with a larger developer might upset that, so it definitely seems like Halfbrick is more interested in making its own games than pitching in, no matter how big the potential payoff may be. As for that impending new iOS title, Larsen won't say much more than that he "...would love to release another iOS game this year." Certainly Halfbrick is working on something (and maybe even more than one thing), but the current focus is Jetpack's update. As for whether a new game would be paid (like Fruit Ninja has been) or freemium (like Jetpack Joyride has been for most of its success), Larsen said both strategies are still valid, depending on the game. "We've made more money on Fruit Ninja paid than we've ever done" selling Jetpack Joyride's in-app purchases, says Larsen. "We can sell games and we can do freemium. Does that mean Fruit Ninja's more universal? Probably yeah." Larsen admits that Jetpack Joyride could probably have skewed more towards a casual audience. It originally started paid and then was sent free to find its audience. But it's hard to second guess Larsen and Halfbrick given all of their company's success, and Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride still set quite a few bars for app quality on Apple's App Store. The company has done really great things so far -- we're intrigued to see just what's coming next.
Exent's GameTanium Mobile launches for Android tabs
OnLive users may have been dining at the all-you-can-eat gaming table since December, but now it's time for the GameTanium crew to pull up a chair. Game provider Exent has brought its subscription platform to Android tablets and offers unlimited access to titles such as Fruit Ninja, Baseball Superstars and T-Racer HD. The service rolls in at a cent under six dollars a month, and there's a three-day free trial for those with commitment issues. The new mobile service is available right away via a direct .apk, so if you want in, skip past the Android Market and take a peek at the press release after the break instead.
Fruit Ninja's price slashed to ten cents on Android Market today
Normally we'd be skeptical of heavily discounted fruit, but we think this offer is safe for consumption. In honor of the Android Market's ten millionth download, that platform's version of Fruit Ninja is on sale for ten cents today! Halfbrick also informs us that Age of Zombies will be on sale for a dime this Saturday. Good thing, too -- we can't be expected to pay almost a whole dollar for every game.
Fruit Ninja plushies coming soon to a wrapped gift near you
Angry Birds can't have all the fun, right? Halfbrick Studios is set to embrace the iOS marketing frenzy by releasing a pair Fruit Ninja plush toys. The sensei and a smiling (or is that sliced?) watermelon in a branded headband will introduce the series. The sensei is available right now on the company's web store for US$15.99, while the watermelon will be available "soon" for just a buck less. I have to admit, these are pretty darn cute. Halfbrick Studios is not only a talented set of game designers, but a really nice group of folks as well. Does this mean we'll soon be getting a Jetpack Backpack from Jetpack Joyride? I don't know how cuddly a sliced watermelon is, but Fruit Ninja is a great game, and I wouldn't mind having one of these guys under my tree come this holiday season.
Fruit Ninja plushies prove it's possible to milk fruit
Other than coconuts, we mean. Halfbrick Studios is making a claim on more of your money, after some admittedly reasonable financial demands from the Fruit Ninja series. The developer has opened a store offering two themed plush toys, which include the cutest watermelon you've ever forcibly bisected, and a happy Sensei whom you can pretend is performing said cut. In the US, the Sensei sells for $16 (or 16 times the price of a copy of Fruit Ninja), the Watermelon for $15 (1.5 Fruit Ninja Kinects), and a "Training Pack" of both for $30. The Sensei is available now, but that adorable melon is shipping in mid-January. We may sound as if we're giving Halfbrick a hard time for cashing in on Fruit Ninja, but we're happy for the developer. The games have been universally worthwhile, and the toys are undeniably huggable. Besides, Halfbrick has to raise money to save the Australian game industry, pretty much single-handed.
Fruit Ninja dev Halfbrick chopping away at sequel in new Sydney studio
Halfbrick Studios is working on a sequel to Fruit Ninja at its new government-supported studio in Sydney, Australia. In mid-October it was revealed that the Brisbane-based company was opening up a second studio in Sydney; a new piece in the Illawarra Mercury tosses up some more details. According to New South Wales Deputy Premier Andrew Stoner, the studio is the result of a new $3 million "Interactive Media Fund," but there is no clear indication regarding how much of that fund went to Halfbrick. "The new Sydney team will develop the next evolution of the Fruit Ninja games franchise. The new game will involve players launching a series of fruit to knock ninjas off their towers in a 3D world, with each fruit having special powers," Stoner said. The game is expected in 2012, with an initial launch on iOS. Stoner explained the $3 million fund is designed to support local developers over the next two years. Given the current state of the Australian development scene for big publishers, it may be time to get a bigger fund for the local indies.
iOS games get so, so real in this bizarre music video
Aussie indie pop group Hey Geronimo were interested in promoting their latest single, "Why Don't We Do Something?," so they made this terrifying montage of iOS games acted out in real life, you see. We're not exactly sure how this happened, but we can't say we're sorry it did.
