iGame Radio

Gameloft is the latest in a series of game companies to put a selection of their iPhone games on sale for $.99 in prep for the iPhone 4 release tomorrow. Though some have already have received their pre-ordered iPhone 4, many game companies have jumped on the bandwagon to catch new iPhone 4 purchasers with cheap games ready at launch. Gameloft joins the likes of EA Mobile, Virtual Programming, and Ambrosia Software for offering this limited time $.99 deal on iPhone games.

Gameloft is offering GT Racing: Motor Academy, UNO, Brothers in Arms 2: Global Front, Gangstar: West Coast Hustle, Shrek Kart, N.O.V.A. Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance, and Assassin’s Creed: Altaïr’s Chronicles for only $.99 in the App Store. And though the iPhone 4 release is limited at this time to select countries, Gameloft is making this sale global for a limited time. All Gameloft games can be found on the App Store.

Appular Games has announced their next iPhone game, an addictive arcade puzzler called iSlice. The idea is to slice parts from geometric objects on the screen. But the geometric objects have little balls bouncing around inside of them, and the slices you take off can have these balls all on one side only.

The gameplay is that simple, but seems to quite complex as the balls bouncing around start to come in different sizes. The game is available for $.99 on the App Store today.

Well, everyone else is doing it, so Virtual Programming decided to join the gang. In the rush to the bottom, all of their iPhone games are now $.99 (59p in the UK, 0.79
euros elsewhere).

And they have a few you may not have heard of, including the Saqqarah series of seven puzzle games, each dedicated to a Temple of an Egyptian god (Sobek, Osiris, Horus, Anubis, Thot, Isis, and Bast). Each release, or Temple, offers a variety of different matching puzzle games, each with different gameplay mechanics.

Another game is the classic favorite Pipe Mania. The iPhone version includes a lite version to try out for free and social scoring and networking through Scoreloop.

You can check out all of Virtual Programming’s iPhone games and see for yourself.

Hemisphere Games reported last week on their website that they are in the process of bringing their award-winning game, Osmos, to the iPhone and iPad. According to the blog post, as soon as they had completed the Mac port they began porting the game to the iPhone six months ago.

During the process, they came to realize that some design changes would be necessary to the game, but overall the game would work very well on the iPhone and iPod Touch. When the iPad was announced and released, they became very excited about the possibilities, but only recently obtained an iPad to begin testing.

Hemisphere Games is currently looking for beta testers for the iPad version. They will also be beta testing the iPhone version at some future date.

Wolfire Games has posted a wonderful discussion regarding the OnLive streaming game service that launched officially (for some definition of “officially”) yesterday at 6PM PT/9PM ET. Jeff from Wolfire Games has been participating in the Beta for OnLive, and had some very good and smart insights into the service that detail the merits and downfalls of OnLive well.

However, during the post, he let slip an interesting tidbit that lead to some exciting thoughts.

From the OnLive FAQ:

Unfortunately, because of licensing restrictions, we can only offer Mass Effect 2 for play under Windows. So, if you do not have access to a PC, your only option to play it on a Mac is under Windows using Boot Camp or a similar system. We apologize for the inconvenience. OnLive has no other games in the pipeline that are Windows-only, and we do not expect to have any others.

This is ridiculous on so many levels and a great example of why OnLive is so fascinating and controversial. I might be able to virtualize OnLive in Parallels, so that I would be playing Mass Effect 2 through OnLive on Windows running inside of Parallels virtualized on Mac OS X. It feels bad enough when publishers don’t make the effort to support Mac OS X and Linux, the fact that EA has actually gone out of their way to make ME2 inacessible to Mac OnLive users is worth examining in its own blog post.

Worth examining indeed. So I’ll beat Jeff to the punch and examine it now. Why would Mass Effect 2, amongst all the other games available on the OnLive service (such as Assassin’s Creed 2, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction from Ubisoft, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Just Cause 2 from Square Enix, etc) be unavailable on the Mac through OnLive?

I think it’s because EA, or a Mac publisher in conjunction with EA, has Mass Effect 2 for the Mac in the pipeline right now.

OnLive right now is still an experimental service. Let’s face it, most of the people who are going to sign up for it are early adopters (like me) who can’t wait to try out something new and cutting edge. My neighbor next door isn’t going to try it out now (Mac user though he is). And certainly my older friend whose laptop I just helped fix won’t. It’s going to be another year or more before this service is going to be anything other than early adopter fodder.

We early adopters are also the biggest source of revenue for a new game on the Mac that requires a higher end Mac. Like Mass Effect 2. If EA were to bring Mass Effect 2 to the Mac in another 1.5 years or longer, those “higher end Macs” would start to become lower end Macs. A wider audience would be picking the game up.

Except that biggest group would have already played it. They’ve played it on their boot camp partitions. They’ve played it on their Parallels/VMware Fusion/Crossover virtualized Macs. They’ve played it on their PCs (horrors!). If any buy it at that time, it’s for nostalgia and because they want to see what it’s like to run a native game on their Mac.

Why wait if EA can get in the high-end, early adopter range to buy the game now, from OnLive? Then they could bring the game to the Mac natively later, if they still want to, for the lower end machines.

That would work…only if they didn’t have a Mac version in the pipeline now.

I dunno…maybe I’m dreaming. But this certainly seems to be the most logical answer to that question to me.

Yesterday, OnLive, the streaming gaming service, launched. Or rather, they opened their doors a little and allowed a few people to enter a little bit at a time. Not apparently ready for a full-scale launch, OnLive has presented the Founding Members offer, which will allow select members who join between now and July 15th access to a free account for a year. Those who register for the Founding Members offer actually get put on a waiting list with hopes of getting chosen in their area.

However, upon reviewing the OnLive Terms of Service, one finds some disturbing requirements. Read more…

 

 

What’s inside this episode:

• Due to the length of the podcast, it had to be cut into two parts. The first part has the second half of the Tales of Monkey Island review and coverage of the iPhone 4 pre-orders. The second part has the interview with Chris Hazard of Hazardous Software and coverage of E3.
• Omaha revisits Tales of Monkey Island by TellTale Games to complete her review. Even with the graphical issues, the game comes off with the same engaging charm and deep storyline that Mac gamers have come to love in the Monkey Island series.
  
• An interview with Chris Hazard of Hazardous Software about Achron. Hazardous Software just recently released an experimental port of their time-traveling game to the Mac. Omaha discusses the port, how the game has been developing, and what Chris has learned since the last time iGame Radio spoke with him.

Show Notes:

• Omaha Sternberg and Corey Tamas of MacGamer talk about the iPhone 4 pre-orders. Servers down, interminable wait times to pre-order, no white iPhone included (Corey doesn’t care!), and purchase information security broken all over the place. But, hey, 600,000 pre-orders in one day!
• E3 used to be a place Mac gamers could look at from far away and just dream. Now dreams can become reality. Omaha and Corey talk about what actual Mac games were shown at E3, and what games announced might turn out for the Mac in the future.
• Corey finally got his iPad months after Omaha got hers. But he can still brag that he can tether.

Music Notes:

• Digital Droo produced our theme music here at iGame Radio.
• Rich Carlson featured music from Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.
• Digital Droo featured music from Neon Tango.

Alawar Games has dropped a bundle on the App Store. Three of their popular games, Farm Frenzy, Smash Frenzy 2, and Gourmania have been bundled together for one price. The 3-in-1 Fun Frenzy Pack costs $1.99. Considering that each game normally goes for $.99, that means that you are basically getting a game for free.

The bundle is interesting because it seems to be the first time that a major game publisher has released such multi-game pack on the App Store. The games are small enough that the combined total is still less than 82 MB in size, so won’t be a big hit to download times. Also, the games themselves are diverse…Farm Frenzy is a time management game, Gourmania is more of a hidden object game, and Smash Frenzy 2 has break-out style to it…so they give an idea of the different types of games that Alawar publishes.

Whether this will be a trend for the future for the App Store is unknown. Also unknown is how long such a bundle would remain on the App Store. Logically that would be a limited time only type of situation. But we might see other bundles from Alawar is this type of game marketing works for them.

Via Gamezebo

Via IGN, BoingBoing has published screen footage that Valve showed off at E3 today of Portal 2 gameplay. This is in-game footage showing the first few minutes of the game, including the awakening of GLaDOS. You can continue through the link to check out the other two videos that delve deeper into gameplay features.

I will say one thing. If Valve doesn’t provide a way to kill off that helper sphere, someone’s gonna create a cheat for it. And by “someone” I mean me.

ETA: I was updated by Virtual Programming that the native port is not yet available, and that this was intended as a pending announcement only. They apologize for the mistake and will update everyone when the final version is available.

All Six Million Dollar Man jokes aside, Virtual Programming announced recently that they decided to reissue X3: Reunion as a non-Cider, native port. Apparently many had issues with regards to performance, and Virtual Programming felt the need to fix this.

“We weren’t happy with X3: Reunion’s performance when using Cider, and it turned out many of our customers weren’t either,” said Virtual Programming CEO Mark Hinton. “As a gesture of goodwill, we reengineered the game as a native port that’s a free update for existing customers. Starting today, new X3: Reunion customers will receive the non-Cider version of the game.”

Sweeeeet! The non-Cider port can be purchased as a digital download on Virtual Programming’s Deliver2Mac site.