Games

New Apple TV said to focus on games, challenging traditional consoles

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Nick Wingfield, writing for the New York Times:

It’s tough to know how compelling the games on Apple TV will be until the company reveals the system this week. Yet many of the components necessary for a satisfying game experience will come with the device, the people say — including more power for better graphics, a new remote that could double as a controller and, perhaps most important, an app store to buy and download games.

The controller is critical. Is it possible to deliver a controller that serves TV, Bejeweled, and Call of Duty in a single package?

Explore Zelda’s Hyrule in your browser

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Does the name Zelda ring a bell? If you thought Hyrule, rather than Fitzgerald, then check out this animated HTML 5 map of Hyrule Kingdom from A Link to the Past.

Crystal Quest reboot

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Cool! A Kickstarter to bring Crystal Quest back to life. I’m definitely in.

Parity, a game

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Parity is a free, web-based puzzle game, in the same class as Threes and the like, though not at all the same.

Six Colors lists their favorite iOS games

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Jason Snell and Dan Moren of Six Colors put together a list of their favorite iOS games. The usual suspects are there, but there are plenty of games that were new to me. A nice little list.

The value of Twitch

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About a month ago, word spread that Google-owned YouTube had completed negotiations to buy game-streaming service Twitch with an all-cash offer of $1 billion.

Yesterday, YouTube had the rug pulled from under them when Twitch announced that they had accepted another all-cash bid for $970 million from Amazon. Here’s the thank you post from Twitch CEO Emmett Shear.

So why would someone care about this? The key is the allure of Let’s Play, the general term for watching someone else play your favorite game. A huge win for Amazon. [Hat tip to Daniel Mark]

Nintendo rises after report Pokemon game to debut on iPad

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This is a tricky piece of news.

Nintendo Co. (7974) jumped in Tokyo trading after its new Mario Kart 8 video game surpassed 1 million units in U.S. sales and affiliate The Pokemon Co. said an online trading-card game will be released as an application for Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPad.

The Pokémon game is owned by The Pokémon Company, which is affiliated with Nintendo (Nintendo has certain licensing and marketing rights) but not owned by Nintendo.

“We have been here many times before in regards to Nintendo’s tentative plans to introduce some of its characters for smart devices,” Amir Anvarzadeh, a manager of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. in Singapore, said by e-mail. “This latest Pokemon cards plan which is already out on PCs is hardly a change in its direction.”

This is not quite correct.

Game about squares

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This is a fun little game, a puzzle challenge that requires you to move squares around on your screen using a simple set of rules, getting them to rest on a preset position.

Xbox hits the market as China’s ban on video games falls

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Businessweek:

Microsoft today began taking orders for its new game console from online retailer JD.com Inc. (JD:US) via Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s (700) mobile-messaging applications. The pair of Chinese Internet companies hold exclusive rights to pre-sell the locally made Xbox One until July 30, JD.com said in a news release. The console is slated to ship nationwide in September.

Important market expansion for Microsoft and the Xbox team.

Google launches iOS version of Ingress, a massively multiplayer augmented reality game

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[VIDEO] Ingress was created by a startup within Google called Niantic Labs. From the Wikipedia page:

The gameplay consists of establishing “portals” at places of public art, landmarks, cenotaphs, etc., and linking them to create virtual triangular fields over geographic areas. Progress in the game is measured by the number of Mind Units, i.e. people, nominally controlled by each faction (as illustrated on the Intel Map).

Here’s a link to the iOS version of the game. It’s free. Note that you’ll need to login with a gmail or other Google account.

Note also that you’ll need to share your location with the game and that your location will be shared with other players. There is a bit of risk there, both in privacy and in sharing your actual location with people you don’t know. This is the one aspect of the game I find worrisome.

The trailer is embedded below.

Lego Fusion scans your bricks into a virtual world

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Build a 16×16 facade, including a door. The Lego Fusion app (iOS and Android compatible) scans the facade and imports it into a virtual world. Build on your facade inside the world and defend it from attack.

New open-world Zelda among Nintendo’s many E3 announcements

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[VIDEO] Nintendo is doing everything they can to raise awareness and adoption of their stagnant Wii U console. They made inroads this week at E3 with a boatload of new games, led by the latest incarnation of their flagship Zelda series.

The latest Zelda game for Wii U is vast and beautiful, with a huge world for players to explore. Grass shimmers underfoot and everything feels grander in scope. Nintendo says it wants to break its own conventions for the franchise and give players more options for how they tackle challenges and puzzles.

Watch the trailer embedded in the original post to get a sense of things. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until next year to be able to get our hands on the new Zelda game. This is what Nintendo needed to do. Clearly, waiting until 2015 to finally make their platform relevant is not ideal. But Nintendo has the cash to ride this out. The question is, will the Wii U hardware still be competitive in 2015? That’s a long time between hardware revs.

Woz was once the best Tetris player on the planet – Here’s proof.

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Tetris was the killer app that brought Nintendo’s GameBoy into the mainstream.

Thirty years ago today, Russian computer programmer Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov created Tetris. Unveiled behind the Iron Curtain, the deceptively simple, maddeningly addictive game soon left the Soviet Union. It lived on dozens of platforms, but its Lennon-McCartney (Lenin-McCartney?) partner was Nintendo’s Game Boy. And the duo defined modern mobile gaming as we know it.

The article is a nice read, but take a look at the comments. Hint: Search for “Woz”.

Escape rooms, the real life video games

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I am a big fan of escape rooms. The basic premise is, you are locked in a room and need to solve a series of puzzles to get out, perhaps to another escape room. There have long been virtual escape rooms. My favorite of these is The Room series on iOS.

The linked article explores some real life escape rooms. They range from pure puzzle sets to a more theatrical presentation. Personally, I’d love to see a video game that marries the best of both worlds: A multi-player implementation of an escape room that gives you a virtual presence in an escape room, a real social experience.

Osmo connects iPad gaming to physical world

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[VIDEO] At first blush, this might seem an unnecessary complication. In order to play Osmo games, you sit your iPad in a stand in portrait mode, then place a clip over the iPad camera that contains a small mirror. A tangram puzzle appears on the screen, and you slide blocks on the table in front of the iPad to complete the puzzle.

No big deal, right?

But there’s something more to this than simply reflecting puzzle pieces onto the screen. There’s a real interaction between the actions in the physical world and a model’s representation in the virtual world. Kinda, sorta, an augmented reality, but done very simply, cleanly, just perfect for a series of kids games.

The video in the main post is a marketing piece, for sure, but it does a good job of getting the point across.

The positive and negative effects of video games

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I’ve seen a number of articles purporting to lay out the evils or the benefits of video games for kids. This article actually does a good job of laying out the pros and cons, reasonably objectively. Personally, I’m pro video games, with a healthy mix of other activities mixed in.

Game of Phones

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A kickstarter based on a deck of custom cards and a group of friends with smartphones. Great idea.