Weekend Price Drops: Get Lucky Edition

By On , 3:04 pm GMT · Add Comment · In Price Drops
Lose yourself to dance.

Come on come on come on come on come on

The sun is shining. It’s a holiday weekend in the UK and the US. The new Daft Punk record is on Spotify. That big asteroid is probably not going to collide with the Earth. Life is good, people.

We’re also on the cusp of what might be the biggest release week of the year so far. We already know for sure that next Wednesday night will bring us Warhammer Quest, but it could possibly usher in Agricola and Great Battles Medieval, too. The latter game has run afoul of the App Store team, which makes two approvals process imbroglios in a row for Slitherine. Maybe they should mail a box of cookies to Cupertino.

For the time being, there’s some excellent discounts on this weekend, starting with a Playdek catalog sale. If you don’t already own Ascension, correct that immediately and pick it up while it’s just a dollar. If I had my druthers, everyone would be issued with a copy of Ascension upon exiting the womb. Until I’m running things, we’ll just have to make do.

More sales and what not after the jump.

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Review: Rebirth of Fortune 2

By On , 12:00 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS Reviews
Oops.

This is a (corrected) motley crew.

SRPGs sit unsurely between games of large-scale conquest and vanilla roleplaying. In one regard, they’re more personable; instead of dealing with a symbol of an abstraction of a representation of 1000 Napoleonic soldiers, you’re hand-picking every individual unit of your revolutionary platoon, like a Robin Hood-Danny Ocean crossbreed, only prettier. “Hey, there’s Captain Felt, and Bow-Lady, and Hat-Guy,” you might say.

But, in contrast, these games also avoid the deep character development and true sense of avatarhood common in RPGs, under the pretense of some Great Magical War and hey, we’re just Cogs In Some Sort of Machine That Fights Great Magical Wars, Eh? “What really motivates Hat-Guy, in the philosophical sense?” you might never say, ever.

These are two difficult lines to toe, and yet Rebirth of Fortune 2 (Fortune Chronicle Episode Four: Magical Revolution), in its clumsy, colorful, sub-sub-titled way, somehow manages to get it’s wee little piggies doing just that.

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Jagged Alliance Flashback gets funded by a nose

By On , 9:31 am GMT · Add Comment · In News
Now for Space Hulk.

War trophy.

I imagine that there are some wicked hangovers in Copenhagen this morning: Danish devs Full Control hit the $350,000 funding target that they set for their Kickstarter just hours before the Thursday evening deadline. The pitch finished with about 18 grand to spare, though Full Control honcho Thomas Hentschel-Lund tells us that they picked up more funds via their PayPal-based secondary funding route. The devs ran an absolutely Pheidippidean campaign, doing scores interviews (including one with us) and tirelessly updating their pitch.

The prequel to the classic squad tactical series should be out for desktop platforms late this next year — and I still cling to my prediction that tablet editions will follow. The next thing we’ll be seeing from Full Control is their iOS reimagining of Space Hulk, which we should hopefully be playing this summer.

Don’t blink: Six seconds of Breach and Clear

By On , 9:41 pm GMT · Add Comment · In Android News, iOS News
We used to make things in this country.

Which one of you guys is Frank Sobotka?

Gun Media, the guys behind forthcoming iOS & Android squad tactical Breach & Clear, have sent along this new-fangled “Vine” of their game in action — some of the first moving pictures of the game we’ve seen since it was announced back in February. I remain a little leery of B&C’s freemium intentions, but it’s looking like the tactical military porn we were promised. Gun have said that they’ll be revealing more details about gameplay in the next few weeks.

Now I know I’m getting old because I have literally no idea how the dickens to make this video play on an iPad. None. I also couldn’t get it to run in Firefox, but it did work in Safari. I’m obviously missing something, so if you’re a hip millennial who knows what’s up, have your mom or dad send me a telegram that explains it.

The Vine is after the jump. Good luck.

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Rebuild sequel Gangs of Deadsville is due next spring

By On , 7:05 pm GMT · Add Comment · In Android News, iOS News
Under water.

Can’t imagine that real estate prices are too strong in Deadsville.

We last checked in with Sarah Northway back in January when she was just starting to lay the groundwork for a new game in her Rebuild series of.. whatever Rebuild is. Post-zombie-apocalypse city-building survival horror adventure? If you’ve got a shorter/catchier moniker, let me know.

Northway was in touch today to let us know that she reckons Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville should be done by early 2014, and she’s using the results of a player survey to guide her efforts. Like the last Rebuild game, the new title will be available for every conceivable platform: iOS, Android, PC/Mac downloadable, web browser, Chumby, Dreamcast, Babbage engine, and Blackberry.

The sui generis Rebuild is one of my favourite mobile games and I broadly agree with the player survey’s insight that a new game would benefit from a touch more complexity and randomness.

A mockup of the in-development Gangs of Deadsville is after the jump.
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Dead drop: PlayRaven tells us all about their debut iOS game Spymaster

By On , 4:23 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News, Previews
Stellaaaaaa

Stella!

Lasse Seppänen and Thiago Rocha are on Skype with me. They’ve ducked into an empty room at the Slagthuset Conference Center in Malmo, away from the bustle of the 10th Annual Nordic Game Conference. What is the Nordic Game Conference?, I ask them.

“It’s partly a government venture,” Lasse tells me. “You get a chance to meet other developers and the governments of the Nordic countries give grants to help fund game development.”

This is how much more civilized the Nordic countries are than the rest of us. Everybody in Scandinavia speaks three languages, they invented flatpack furniture, their prisons are kitted out like luxury condos (and their crime recidivism rate is basically zero), and their governments just hand out cash to make video games. That’s beautiful, I tell Lasse. “It really is,” he says.

Seppänen and Rocha are co-founders of PlayRaven, a brand-new outfit based in Helsinki that is working on one of the most exciting game ideas I’ve heard in years. They’d just announced the award of a Nordic Game grant to develop it, in fact.

PlayRaven is a 5-man studio in Helsinki led by Seppänen, the CEO of the new studio and ex-Remedy producer, where he lead the Alan Wake team. Design lead Rocha is also formerly of Remedy and had been working on Quantum Break — possibly the only thing that people were universally excited about coming out of this week’s Xbox One announcement.

The game that PlayRaven want to make is Spymaster, a spy network management game for iOS set in 1941 in the cities of Nazi-occupied Europe. “To put it very, very simply: it’s Football Manager for spies,” Rocha said.

I immediately stop thinking about the Scandinavian welfare state. Tell me more, I said.

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Won’t someone think of the orks? Warhammer Quest coming next Wednesday night

By On , 11:10 am GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
Snotling not much better, surely.

Dude, greenskin is not the preferred nomenclature.

What an awful week to be an ork. If you’re an ork, my heart goes out to you. Truly.

Not only have we learned this week that Slitherine’s forthcoming Warhammer 40K Armageddon for iPad will be a veritable ork genocide sim, but now news comes to us via Eurogamer that Warhammer Quest will be releasing next week. Having played a fair bit of Warhammer Quest, I can tell you that this game’s many dungeons are basically ork abattoirs, filled to the rafters (if dungeons have those) with orks that you’re meant to kill.

If you want to continue man’s war of persecution against the poor, unlettered ork, stay tuned for our review of Warhammer Quest for iOS. The Games Workshop-licensed dungeon crawler from the makers of Hunters 2 is definitely one of the year’s standout games so far. We’ll put the review up at midnight next Thursday morning.

Rodeo Games’ most recent gameplay video of WQ is after the jump.

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Rubicon, Bringer of War: First video of Combat Monsters

By On , 7:08 am GMT · Add Comment · In Android News, iOS News
Just a guess.

It’s probably good to have the physical manifestations of Death and Power on your team.

In my time zone, it is way, way too early in the morning for Holst — but in Rubicon’s defense, he posted this teaser video of Combat Monsters last night at a more allegro hour. We first talked about the fantasy follow-up to Great Big War Game about a month ago.

Rubicon has said that he wants this multiplayer-focused tactical game to play like a card game but with more visual spectacle — you can definitely see what he’s going for now that we’re seeing the game in motion.

Have a look at the Combat Monsters teaser after the jump. Maybe turn down your speakers if you haven’t had any coffee yet, though.

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The Agricola Interview: Joel Goodman on Playdek’s biggest game yet

By On , 9:57 pm GMT · Add Comment · In Features, Tactical Chat
Don't be like that.

It’s a farm town, but don’t you dare call it Farmville.

Last year was Playdek’s year. After releasing a quiver full of bona fide hit games, graced with some of the most sought-after board game licenses in the business, you could argue (as I did) that the San Diego-based studio had no peers in the world of mobile core gaming.

But if you wanted to look for criticisms to level, it could be argued that Playdek was playing it safe. All of their highly-acclaimed iOS games were cousins — deck-building card games with broadly similar mechanics. Look closely at Summoner Wars — their highest profile departure from the deck-building genre — and you could see the Ascension engine peeking out at you from behind the Jungle Elves. Maybe Playdek was a one-trick pony.

To prove that there’s more in Playdek’s arsenal than just card games, they decided to bring Agricola, Uwe Rosenberg’s 2007 board game about managing a medieval family farm, to iOS. Hoping that your next big App Store hit will come from a famously complex Euro board game seems a pretty crazy bet at first — but Agricola isn’t just any Euro board game.

There are many sets of eyes watching Playdek at this moment. Firstly, the fans. Agricola is a game that is regarded with real reverence by its fans, and it’s fans are legion. The Bible of Board Games, BGG, currently lists Agricola as the 3rd-best board game of all time. Besides the players, there’s also the investors. This is Playdek’s first release since raising $4 million in venture funding back in April, and their new partners will be eager to see that their money has been invested wisely. In my conversations with Playdek’s leadership over the past months, I’ve gotten the sense that they are keenly aware of how important Agricola is both to the hobby gaming public and to their future. Whether 2013 turns out to also be Playdek’s year will depend to a great degree on Agricola’s reception.

After the jump, my conversation with Playdek CEO Joel Goodman: their philosophy for translating Agricola from cardboard to touchscreens, what they learned from Summoner Wars and Nightfall, what veterans of Ascension and other Playdek games can expect from this new title, and more.

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Ore gates: Online multiplayer coming for Catan

By On , 3:53 pm GMT · Add Comment · In Android News, iOS News
Stays together? Dunno about that.

The family that Catans together.

When it launched way, way back in the hazy past of 2009, Catan (and its later iPad HD counterpart) set gold standard for iOS board gaming. Times were simpler then, and the only thing we asked of our digital board games was that they function reliably and not overtax our steam-powered iPhones. Despite its age, the mobile adaptation of Settlers of Catan is a still regular in the top 100 apps in many countries.

Now in the Jetsons future of 2013 we want things like online multiplayer, something that Catan’s developers USM didn’t originally include — but to keep pace with Johnny-Come-Latelys like Stone Age and Battle of the Bulge, it’s a necessity.

USM tells me that online multiplayer for Catan is now in late beta and nearing release. This will not be Game Center multiplayer, as the German devs are cooking up their own solution to allow for cross-platform play with Catan for Android. This might well be USM’s most ambitious development yet.

Given how much Catan focuses on wheeling and dealing, it doesn’t strike me as the ideal online game — but I’m willing to be surprised.