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.

Let’s over-analyse Slitherine’s Warhammer 40K Armageddon announcement

By On , 11:50 am GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
*Sniff*

I love the smell of lasguns in the morning.

Whilst I was otherwise occupied yesterday, the overworked sods at strategy imprint Slitherine put a name to their previously announced Warhammer 40K game bound for PC and iPad. Warhammer 40,000 Armageddon will take place in Games Workshop’s signature science-fiction dystopia and chronicle the Second War for Armageddon, where the Emperor’s Space Marines repulsed an invasion by the Orkz, the galaxy’s fiercest warriors and worst spellers.

I tried every trick in the book to get some more details or an image out of Slitherine, but no dice. Given Games Workshop’s the tight control over their intellectual property (remember what Rodeo Games told us about their insistence on getting the lore right in Warhammer Quest), maybe that’s no surprise. Slitherine wouldn’t even reveal if the game was being developed in-house like Battle Academy or if it was being handled by a Slitherine partner like Lordz, the makers of Panzer Corps.

So let’s go through Slitherine’s announcement in detail — I think there’s a clue about what to expect buried in there.

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Knights of the Old Republic for iPad potentially outed by newsletter slip-up

By On , 11:57 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
Space conversations.

Who knew Bono was a Jedi?

IGN is reporting that a newsletter from Mac porting specialists Aspyr Media has revealed a forthcoming iPad edition of Bioware’s classic Star Wars RPG Knights of the Old Republic. The email sent around to Aspyr customers about Call of Duty for Mac erroneously included a sub-header reading “The critically-acclaimed Star Wars RPG is now available on iPad…”. The HTML email is still online here for the time being.

IGN‘s Justin Davis assumes this refers to KOTOR — and I agree. It sure as heck doesn’t mean Yoda Stories. It could theoretically be some sort of companion app to the current Star Wars: The Old Republic PC MMO, but that doesn’t really fit with Aspyr’s modus operandi.

Knights of the Old Republic is one of the best RPGs of its generation and one of the last (if not the last) good Star Wars game. My sepia-tinted memories from 2003 suggest that the controls wouldn’t be too hard to implement on a touchscreen, either. In an ideal world, this could also mean that KOTOR 2 will be getting ported as well, which presents an opportunity to fix a potentially brilliant game that was rushed out the door too quickly by its publisher in a catastrophically buggy state. But hey, one thing at a time.

I’ll see if Aspyr has got any comment to make on the matter. Maybe this is all a misunderstanding because Aspyr’s copy writers use the world’s most tantalizing lorem ipsum.

Bountiful harvest: Two exclusive screenshots of Playdek’s Agricola for iOS

By On , 7:00 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
Reap what you sow.

Bumper crop.

I don’t suppose these will require too much preamble: here is the very first look the most anticipated game since Go: Playdek’s Agricola for iOS. Very rightfully listed amongst our 2013 most-wanted games, Agricola has been over a year in the works and marks the vaunted developer’s first significant departure from the deck-building card games they made their bones with.

I’ve just hung up from a very interesting hour-long chat with Playdek CEO Joel Goodman, where we talked at length about Agricola’s development and Playdek’s plans for the near future. That interview will be up here on the site tomorrow but for now, feast your eyes on the shot over there to the right and the one I’ve buried below the jump.

In true Playdek fashion, Goodman couldn’t be pinned down to any particular release date, but barring any 11th hour App Store approvals shenanigans, Agricola shall be upon us very soon.

One more screenshot after the jump — check back tomorrow for my interview with Joel Goodman and even more screenshots of Agricola. In the meantime, have a read of my interview with Playdek execs Gary Weis and George Rothrock from last month.

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Not satisfied with merely kicking doors, new DoorKickers trailer blows them up

By On , 10:54 am GMT · Add Comment · In Android News, iOS News
Hello.

Say hello to my little friend.

When it rains small-scale tactical games, it pours small-scale tactical games. Last week’s release of Frozen Synapse (our review should be up later today, by the way) seems to have been the biggest launch for a hardcore iOS game yet — developer Paul Taylor told me that FS has been featured on the App Store front page in nine different countries.

Frozen Synapse will soon have some company. DoorKickers, the SWAT-flavoured tactical game we’ve been talking about all year, has a new PC alpha available to download for pre-ordered customers that adds more squad commands, a new planning UI, and something I wish I have every time I lock myself out of the flat: explosive-assisted entry.

The new trailer is after the jump. DoorKickers still doesn’t have an ironclad release date but the alpha builds have already been pretty damned fun — check out PT forum denizen OBollocks’ entertainingly obscene playthrough of the previous alpha.

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Erwin is coming: Slitherine reveals Rommel in Normandy expansion for BA

By On , 8:01 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
Boom.

Out-foxed?

Slitherine is all about role reversals this year. Besides flipping Panzer Corps on its head later this year with the Ike & Patton-sporting Allied Corps, Battle Academy is getting to play opposite day with the just-announced expansion Rommel in Normandy. Leading German forces for the first time, you’ll be putting on the boots of the Desert Fox in his quest to delay the Allied push across Europe.

As much as I’ve been wishing for some non-European WWII action lately, I must admit that Slitherine have chosen wisely here. Not only do you get to play as Rommel — the cuddliest Wehrmacht officer — but the Normandy scenario means you get to push around all of the late-war German kit: King Tigers, Jagdpanthers, Elefants — the cool stuff.

The 10-mission Rommel in Normandy expansion will (like previous expansion Operation Husky) be available for iPad around the same time as it is for PC & Mac — though they’re not saying just when that is yet. We’ll keep you posted.

Title Bout Championship Boxing coming to iOS and Android this year

By On , 7:28 pm GMT · Add Comment · In Android News, iOS News
I won't bet on ya.

Good luck, Joe.

PISD — a company that has spent the last twenty years supplying developer tools to the likes of Football Manager creators Sports Interactive and Out of the Park Baseball devs OOTP Developments — have decided to get into the game dev game themselves. The company announced today that they’ve acquired the rights to pugilism sim Title Bout Championship Boxing from partners OOTP and plan to release a 2013 edition of the game for Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. The franchise has been lying fallow since 2008.

Following in the footsteps of the hyper-detailed Out of the Park Baseball simulation series, Title Bout will be a text-and-stat-driven sim with thousands of real fighters, multiple ranking systems, and blow-by-blow commentary in each fight.

PISD have got a grip of screenshots of the in-development TBCB on their website — the game is due out on desktops on June 10th with news for the mobile versions coming “soon”.

Review: Mosaique

By On , 2:12 pm GMT · Add Comment · In Android Reviews, iOS Reviews
Does anybody remember Tempest?

Tetris and Tempest had a baby.

Casual mobile puzzlers are sufficiently common that it’s very difficult to garner attention within that category. Winning Blimp have entered the fray with Mosaique, which offers pleasingly simple aesthetics and a moderately interesting spatial relations task. It’s a slightly more cerebral and sedate take on Brickbreaker — Arkanoid for the older, more design-conscious gamer.

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The clock is ticking down on Jagged Alliance Flashback’s Kickstarter

By On , 1:36 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
(No it's not)

Time isn’t on our side.

Space Hulk devs Full Control are just three days away from the deadline on their $350,000 Kickstarter pitch to bring Jagged Alliance back to its turn-based roots — but they’re still a hundred grand short of their goal.

An update posted to the Kickstarter page yesterday has a slightly nervous edge to it, and understandably. According to Kicktraq, Jagged Alliance Flashback is on pace to miss its goal by a wide margin and go home with no money at all. Even with a big 11th-hour push this one is going to be a close-run thing.

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PC adventure Syberia appears for iOS (UPDATED)

By On , 9:34 am GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
The Steampunk Spanking Machine

A terribly complicated fraternity initiation.

Back in the early 2000s, adventure games seemed to have gone more or less extinct. Lucasarts had released its last adventure in 1998 and the gaming public’s ardor for Myst was rapidly cooling. But then (much like they did for American blues music in the 60s and Jerry Lewis in the 70s) the French stepped in, giving a dying genre a renewed lease on life.

One of the first big French adventure games of the 2000s was Syberia, a moody adventure about a mysterious old factory and the spooky gubbins found within. At some point in the last decade-and-a-half, the rights to Syberia were acquired by Big Fish Games, who’ve just released Syberia for iOS over the weekend. It’s free to try with an in-app purchase to unlock the whole game.

It’s been so long since I played Syberia that my recollection of the details has grown hazy — there’s some sort of anachronistic technology going on here. Clockpunk? Steampunk? Postpunk? One of those -punks.

Big Fish haven’t yet put up a trailer for the new release so I went all the way back in time to 2009 to dig up the trailer for the first downloadable PC edition. It awaits you after the jump in glorious 320×240 resolution.

UPDATE: Unusually for a single-player-only game, this appears to be a limited Canadian release for the moment. I’ll see if Big Fish have a plan for a global launch.

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