LG Has Started Its Full European G3 Lollipop Rollout. LG Has Started Its Full European G3 Lollipop Rollout. ZenWatch] Android Wear Lollipop OTA Roundup. ZenWatch] Android Wear Lollipop OTA Roundup. [APK Download] Play Games v2.2 Comes With An Updated Account Picker And New First-Run Experience. Nexus 6 Gets Official TWRP Custom Recovery. Google Posts Updated LRX21R Factory Image For Nexus 9. The Android Police Podcast LIVE (11/13/14) [Game Roundup] Our Top Seven Picks For The Best New Games Of October 2014. An Updated Google Chromecast Stops By The FCC. Flickr App Hits Version 3.1.2, Gets Some New Stuff. Verizon's HTC One Max Finally Getting The Sense 6 OTA.
Madfinger Games Shows Off 'Monzo', Its Upcoming Virtual Model Builder. 7 Useful File Utilities For Android. [Rumor] Is This The Xperia Z3? Maybe Possibly. [New Game] SoulCraft 2 Is An Action RPG With Wings. What I'm playing this week: TA: Little Red Riding Hood. I can't stop playing this one. TA: Little Red Riding Hood (the TA stands for Twisted Adventures) is a great mix of platformer and runner style games, one where you hop from rotating sphere to rotating sphere, hitting the good things and avoiding the bad things.
There are no complicated commands or rules to memorize. You tap the screen to jump. As you jump from sphere to sphere, you'll want to collect the flowers and apples you see along the way. When you see a caged rabbit on a sphere's surface, touch it to free it. Shadow monsters, like wolves, hornets and birds, will kill you and send you back to the beginning of the level if you touch them. The levels get progressively harder, and some are maddeningly difficult to get a perfect score on — just the way we like them to be. While the game physics and mechanics are really good — there's even a different gravity factor based on how fast or slow a sphere is turning — it's the graphics that send TA: Little Red Riding Hood over the top. First look at Gubble Vacation Rush from Apps World. Back during the era of the original Playstation, an arcade-style game called Gubble migrated from PC and Mac to Playstation.
It starred a little purple alien who hopped around in a pogo stick-like vehicle and solved puzzles with simple tools like hammer and screwdriver. Several years later, developer Actual Entertainment released the first Gubble on iOS (Android hadn’t caught on so strongly at that point). At Apps World in San Francisco last week we met with Actual president Franz Lanzinger to learn about Gubble’s upcoming trip to Android.
The hammer-loving alien will soon star in Gubble Vacation Rush, a 3D endless running game. What has Gubble been up to all this time, and what will he bring to the (work)table in Vacation Rush? A change of perspectives Early screenshots Gubble has been away for a long time, and the new game’s story acknowledges his absence. The first Gubble game used a top-down isometric perspective similar to classic arcade games Pac-mania and Crystal Castles. This week's sidebar poll: What are you playing your Android games on? What we're playing: Our favorite Nexus 7 games. I'm not going to lie.
A job that involves playing great games on an equally great tablet like the Nexus 7 is amazeballs. We look through and evaluate hundreds of new apps each month, and plenty of them are games. Then we get choosy, and make sure you know about the best ones. It's a responsibility we take seriously, but it's also pretty fun. Of course, it also means we each have our favorites. You'll see games here that we may have already talked about a little, but they are the ones we love to play and keep going back to. Phil Nickinson Asphalt 8: Airborne: Download from Google Play (free) Never mind that Asphalt is a huge in-app purchase scam. Plants versus Zombies 2: Download from Google Play (free) Plants versus Zombies 2 is the highly successful follow-up to the highly successful original that pits you, Dave, and your plants against zombies looking to eat your brains.
Badland: Download from Google Play (free) Jetpack Joyride: Download from Google Play (free) Jerry Hildenbrand. Eternity Warriors 3 now available on Android. What Games Are: The Fun Boson Does Not Exist. Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here. Back when the social game scene looked like it might be generationally, rather than merely technologically, disruptive, we game makers discovered Eric Ries.
Ries (along with Steve Blank) is the key figure behind the lean startup movement, and at the time his message of fast iteration and customer validation rang true for us for two reasons. First, we were very frustrated working on multi-year-long projects with no clear goal that seemed to be more about some designer’s ego. During those days you could immediately tell who got it and who didn’t with the use of the terms “minimum viable product” (MVP) and “free-to-play” (F2P). MVP and F2P eventually passed into regular industry jargon along with a boat load of other terms.
However they are also often misused. What Games Are: Here Come “Local” Mobile Games. Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here. When we talk about “social” in the context of gaming, we mean one of two ideas. The first is using social networks to distribute games, connect players and provide server-hosted fun over the long term.
These kinds of game are often better described as “parallel,” as they are essentially single-player roleplaying games that sometimes connect to other players out of necessity. The other kind of social is when you gather with people in a physical play area, enjoying each others’ company as much as the play of the game itself. Sports, board games, card games and tabletop roleplaying games are social games in this sense. Unlike social games, local games are usually multiplayer. Local multiplayer is also different to online multiplayer gaming. GameStick Launches OUYA Competitor On Kickstarter, Aims To Be The First Pocketable Android Home Gaming Console. OUYA, the Android-based gaming console that made waves when it first launched on Kickstarter last year, met its first shipping target at the end of December when it sent out development consoles to early backers.
Now in the new year it faces a direct competitor, one that is also seeking financial backing from the crowdfunding site, in the form of GameStick. GameStick will be Android-powered like the OUYA, and even features a similar interface, judging by preliminary shots shown off in the project video. Like OUYA it will also be open, and the company is already in the process of working with developers to bring titles to the console, which it may have an advantage doing, given that it has worked with developers to port titles to Smart TVs for the past three years.
GameStick hopes to ship its device by April 2013, with prototypes going out to early backers by March. The Games Industry Is Driven By Marketing Stories. Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development.
You can follow him on Twitter here. There were many significant games-related stories in 2012. On the one hand there were negative tales, from the breakdown of the social game model to the (not entirely surprising) revelation that the bulk of gamification doesn’t really work. These stories were essentially about novelty wearing off, twinned with the growing general awareness of the playing audience of Skinner-box designs that aren’t much fun. Other negatives included the generally weak anticipation for new consoles and the mass overcrowding of iOS and Android (and no doubt the Windows Store soon enough). However in tandem with those problems came the return of tools intended to solve them. However at some point aggregation is also not enough.
Most choose to try to be impressive. All Games Are (In A Sense) Violent. Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here. In the wake of a terrible event like a mass shooting or terrorist attack, it’s inevitable that the question of video game violence is raised. Whether it’s a reporter showing how Microsoft Flight Simulator could be used to pilot a virtual jet into the World Trade Center, or a psychiatrist worrying about games and the inability of some people to distinguish between reality and fantasy, games get a lot of grief.
At times like these our medium is often portrayed as little more than drug-addiction meets murder-simulator, and we game makers apologise endlessly. We invoke the notion of catharsis, or the physical benefits of games. But we are not really being true to ourselves by adopting these apologist positions. Functional Violence Appearances Deceive. Gift Guide: Favorite Board Games For All Ages. Back in the olden days, before the kids had their smartphones and their Nintendo tapes and their Tivo, families used to get together in a room, open a paper box, and remove a set of boards and pieces. By following a set of rules, families could play these “board games” together and have loads of fun until the candles burned out and someone died of dysentery.
You can relive those halcyon nights with these exciting boardgames that are great for the whole family (we play them all) and one that’s more fun at parties where adult beverages are being served. These are almost all play-tested by my family and peers and we all had a hoot. Labyrinth – The best game for younger kids who can’t read good. To play, you put down a set of corridor tiles and draw “prize” cards. You move your piece – a wizard – along open corridors towards your prize.
Small World – This game is a bit more complex and requires more strategy, but there is little reading involved. The Gameplay Is The Gameplay. Always. Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of leading blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here. Most of the talk around games tends to focus on climate.
It’s about finding the right customers, funding, platform, business model, partnerships, metric and discovery solutions, technology, route to market and so on. How we play the Game of Games, as it were. In this context, we often think of the product as something that needs to fit into a mold. By format I mean that the game has to conform to some conventions. There are two sides to this format argument. Of course, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. What’s interesting is that those from both sides of the aisle will almost always say that the first rule of making games is to make sure that the game is fun. This is because “fun” is traditionally thought to be difficult to define.
Pearson talks mobile disruption in education, games and publishing | Media. "The revolution in education is not something that's going to happen tomorrow. It's starting to happen quite a while ago, when in Nigeria and Kenya kids in schools would use their mobile phones to subscribe to information," says Alina Vandenberghe, head of mobile and gaming at Pearson. Vandenberghe was speaking at the Guardian Mobile Business Summit 2012 conference in London, in a talk focusing on how devices are disrupting the worlds of education, games and publishing. "Besides loving mobile, I love in the morning when I wake up knowing that the products I'm working on impact the next generation, the children," she said.
She also noted that in the US, more than 50% of young children have access to a touchscreen smartphone or tablet, and suggested that children are learning "by doing" rather than just by listening. "The most interesting thing that happened in 2012 is the way content is used is changing, and this happens especially with the textbooks that are leading the way," she said.
How to: Play Classic Pinball Machines for Free with Visual Pinball. A while ago we wrote about setting up a MAME machine, which allows you to play faithfully emulated old arcade games on your computer. In an aside to that article, we mentioned that a similar program exists for the other arcade staple—pinball machines. Some pinball fans have written in, asking for more information, and because we love all arcade technology equally here at Maximum PC, we decided to do a quick writeup on how to get started playing classic pinball machines with Visual Pinball and PinMAME.
So you want to play some pinball, huh? There’s two programs you’ll need if you want to run your favorite arcade pinball machines at home: Visual Pinball and PinMAME. Visual Pinball Visual pinball is a physics simulation program that allows you to play original and recreation pinball tables. Visual Pinball is also a powerful editor for creating your own tables. PinMAME PinMAME, as the name would suggest is the pinball analog to traditional MAME. Rosenfeld Media - Playful Design Book Site. Creating Game Experiences in Everyday Interfaces Published: May 2012 Paperback: 245 pages, ISBN 1-933820-14-4 Digital: ISBN 1-933820-99-3 by John Ferrara What can the field of UX learn from game design? To answer this question, John Ferrara examines the underlying mechanics behind some familiar (and less familiar) games. But be prepared, you'll come away with more than a few new tools and ideas added to your design toolbox! " Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses.
“Playful Design” Blog Why should UX designers care about games? Last week I tweeted this question out to the world. A note to the Gamification Summit: Surviving the backlash This week, scores of designers, developers, marketers, and venture capitalists are meeting up at the Gamification Summit in San Francisco. Can exergames increase physical activity? When it started, I have to admit that I was really excited. Good game design in the real world.