iGame Radio

If you’ve been keeping track of Dofus-Arena and Ankama, then you are probably aware that some new playable classes are coming out for the games. Ankama, the developer, has just released details about the 13th class, The Rogues, complete with images and a comic book.

The Rogue is represented by one Remington Smisse, an agile, clever and charming bandit, who uses bombs to get his point across. Masters of the DIY club, they use and abuse tools and gadgets to carry out their schemes, and use strategy to lay their bombs for maximum effect.

You’ll have several chances to get a good look at the Rogue before the class is released into the wild in April of next year. The Rogue card pack contains a one-month subscription to DOFUS and the first of the Wakfu Comics, Remington, in digital format. This pack gives you exclusive in-game preview access to this new character class starting December 15th, only in DOFUS, and will be available for £5.49 UK or $8.90 US. DOFUS Premium members who got the Premium card in the DOFUS 2.0 collector’s box set will get access to the class starting January 18th.

Ankama will be holding their sixth convention on March 5th and 6th, 2011, at the Grand Palais in Lille, and all classes to be released in April will be previewed there as well. You can check out the various classes the release of new information each day about them at the DOFUS website.

THQ announced the release of Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner, the first mobile Star Wars game featuring AR technology, for iPhone 3GS and 4, and iPod Touch 4G for $4.99. This epic space combat simulator lets players pilot and upgrade the legendary Millennium Falcon while battling Imperial spacecraft across more than twenty levels, including the Death Star escape, asteroid field pursuit over Hoth and infamous Kessel Run. The game includes a social media challenge and taunt system, multi-axis controls, retina-display graphics and 3D sound for maximum game immersion. A HD iPad version will be released later in December.

The Mystery of the Crystal Portal 2: Beyond the Horizon is the sequel to the popular hidden object adventure. The second episode follows up on Nicolle’s adventures in searching for her father in 34 levels across 8 locations. The iPhone version includes Game Center support, multitasking, and iPhone 4 Retina display. Both iPhone and iPad versions are set to hit the App Store on December 2nd and will be available at $2.99 on the iPhone and at $4.99 on iPad.

The Line is a line drawing action/puzzle game with some pretty unique design behind it. Help Eddy as he moves his way ever forward on simple line drawings through puzzles that become ever more difficult. It’s hard to tell from the gameplay trailer exactly how much game balance is involved, but I’m already intrigued. The game is available on the App Store for only $0.99.

In a bid to widen the scope of their casual games reach, Big Fish Games has announced the launch of five new international portals in localized languages taking sixteen different currencies. The portals include Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Italian, and Swedish.

With the number of casual gamers outstripping traditional gamers by a large margin across the world, it would seem a no-brainer to try and access the more than 300 million people who speak at least one of the languages mentioned above. However, surprisingly enough, the move into these locales seems to only have just begun, with games on Facebook leading the way.

“Today we have customers in more than 200 countries and greater than 50 percent of our sales come from international markets,” said Jeremy Lewis, president and chief executive officer of Big Fish Games. “We will continue to invest towards expanding our brand reach to meet the huge demand for premium casual game entertainment in developed and emerging markets.”

In addition to its online portals, Big Fish Games also has retail presence in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxemburg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, the U.K. and the U.S.

Aspyr Media has released RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum for the Mac. This game bundle includes RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Soaked!, and RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Wild.

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Mac is the third installment of the popular tycoon sim game. Create 3D amusement parks and view them in the CoasterCam, which allows you to see your park from any angle and ride what you build. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Soaked! Mac allows you to select from more than 50 new rides and coasters, and use the Swimming Pool and Waterfall Designers to easily create water-based amusements.

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Wild for the Mac gives you the ability to add animal exhibitions, enclosures and animal viewing galleries to your amusement parks. This game contains twelve Wild!-themed scenarios, two new wild design themes, dozens of additional rides and coasters, and the ability to create safari expeditions and train your animals to perform in choreographed shows. In addition, challenges and novel scenery elements have been added to the scenarios to increase the diversity of play.

You can pick up RollerCoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum for $49.99. The minimum system requirements include:

• Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
• CPU Processor: Intel chipset
• CPU Speed: 1.8 GHz or faster
• Memory: 512 MB or higher
• Hard Disk Space: 2GB free disk space
• Video Card: ATI Radeon X1600, NVidia GeForce 7300
• Video Memory (VRam): 128 MB
• Media Required: DVD Drive

In an attempt to delay the inevitable, Valve has pushed back the release of Portal 2 once more to April 18th, 2011. Stating that the delay “marks the shortest delay in Valve’s proud tradition of delays”, Valve continued to insist that cake would be available at the end.

As suspicious as we all are about this cake thing, we can’t help but believe that it’s worth the wait. So, while we await the inevitable convergence of Valve Time (TM) and Real Time (TM), have a peak once again at some awesome co-op gameplay. I’m thinking the cake will be chocolate.

Telltale Games has finally announced the release date for Poker Night at The Inventory, Monday, November 22. The game is in the final stages of pre-order right now.

Poker Night at The Inventory brings together Team Fortress 2′s Heavy, Penny Arcade’s Tycho, Homestar Runner’s Strong Bad and Max from the Sam & Max series in a raucous smack-talking game of Texas Hold-em Poker like you’ve probably never seen before. Poker Night at the Inventory includes special rounds periodically where characters will buy in with un-lockable Team Fortress 2 items. If the player wins the round, the item becomes theirs to use in TF2.

Items that you can unlock include “The Iron Curtain” weapon for use by the Heavy, a Wrist watch from Penny Arcade’s Tycho for the Spy, styling “Dangeresque” sunglasses anted in by Strong Bad and wearable by Demoman, Max’s Lugermorph handgun for use by the Scout and the Engineer, and Max’s Freelance Police badge wearable by any player. As an added bonus, all fans who pre-order Poker Night at The Inventory from Telltale Games or through Steam will receive a poker visor for the Heavy.

Poker Night at The Inventory will be available for PC and Mac for $4.95 and is now available for pre-order at Steam and on the Telltale Games site.

 

What’s inside this episode:

• Host Omaha Sternberg and co-host Corey Tamas of MacGamer talk about the week’s news in Mac and iOS gaming. InstantAction is closing its doors, and looking for a buyer for Torque. What does that mean for developers using the Torque engine, and gamers alike? Omaha and Corey discuss the issue in detail.
• iPad iOS 4.2 is *still* not out…oops, time for Corey to rant. What, you mean December is the end of Fall???
• A bunch of great games have been released or announced this week! Feral Interactive announced Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition. Majesty 2 by Virtual Programming was released (but no Kingmaker as originally announced). The GTA Trilogy was released for the Mac by Transgaming. And id Software released their Rage game for the iPhone.
• EA’s purchase of Chillingo has had some interesting fallout, including comments by developer Secret Exit about publisher branding of a game leaving out the developer. What does this mean about game choices? Should developers choose publishers based on what gamers like about them?
• Omaha talks about the iGame Radio poll, and Omaha and Corey talk about games they’ve played.

Music Notes:

• Digital Droo produced our theme music here at iGame Radio.
• Matt Jarvis for featuring music from Osmos.
• Bobby “Glorian” Slavov and Victor Stoyanov for featuring music from Eschalon: Book 1.

Holy cow! November is the month of awesome! Now we have Feral Interactive announcing Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition for the Mac. Coming December 3rd, Borderlands GotY Edition includes the stand alone game, the entire add-on library, and a bonus fold-out map of Pandora.

Developed by Gearbox Software, this FPS/RPG hybrid has players taking the role of one of four bounty hunters, each with unique skills and weapon proficiencies. Players then search for information and alien artifacts rumored to reside in “The Vault”. With their skills and weapons at hand, it’s lock and load time as they fend off enemies while searching for the Vault.

A procedural content generation system creates practically endless varieties of weapons and enemies to fight, color-coded to mark how rare it is. Borderlands also includes a multiplayer aspect with four-player co-op via online or LAN play.

And no one can forget the visual style of the game, using cel-shading for a unique comic-book style, which. considering the non-story of the game, one couldn’t believe realistic graphics anyway.

Also included are the four DLC for the Borderlands world: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, and the latest new adventure – Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution.

Borderlands GotY Edition for Mac will retail in North America for US$49.95, £34.95 in the UK, and €39.95 throughout Europe. It’s available to pre-order now through Feral’s online store.

Minimum system requirements include:

• 1.8 GHz Intel Mac
• Mac OS X v10.6.4 or later
• 2 GB RAM
• 128 MB or better graphics card (The following cards are NOT supported: ATI X1xxx series, NVIDIA 7xxx series and Intel GMA series)
• DVD drive

Enjoy the cool trailer!

Scarlett and the Spark of Life is an adventure game coming to iPhone and iPod Touch in December. It’s the first episode in a series created by Launching Pad games. In this traditional point-and-click adventure game, the Princess Scarlett is anything but traditional. Kidnapped to await rescue by a knight in shining armor, she’d rather start a fight, make a daring escape, and ride into the sunset on a mechanical horse of her own making. The developer said that the game has been designed from the ground up for the iOS touch-screen platform with an intuitive UI and frustration-free gameplay. The game will launch with a price of $2.99.

Say What You See: The Collection is another merger between hidden object and word games. Launching tomorrow with two hand drawn puzzles, Scary Movies and Books 2 Film, your job is to look through the visual puzzles and figure out what movie they represent. For example, a chainsaw with a Texas flag represents the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The game will update every month with new puzzles and includes Game Center integration. You will be able to purchase it through the app store for $0.99.

Com2uS will also soon launch Touch The Beat, a music game for all three iOS devices. TTB is a new type of rhythm action game where users can tap, drag, hold and multi touch the wide screen of their iOS devices listening to music. The key to this game is that players can create their own games using their own music from their iphones, ipod touches and ipads, then share them with friends. You can check out the trailer for the game to get an idea of how the gameplay, and especially how creating a game, works. Com2uS has also launched several contests, including one to create an icon for the game through crowd-source design. You can check out the information regarding these contests at the Com2uS website.

Since the announcement of Civilization V for the Mac, there have been a series of FAQs that Aspyr Media has placed on their site answering questions regarding the game. One question, however, that Aspyr has avoided answering completely is the full integration of the game with Steam, specifically SteamPlay.

In an effort to get a better grasp on player expectations, Aspyr has posted a “Call for Comments” on the subject, asking for player feedback. The impression is that they themselves have not yet made any final decisions regarding the issue, and need to get a better understanding of what you feel before they make that decision.

Go. Read. Comment. And since everyone is passionate about this issue, on all sides, please be civil about it. Remember the Wheaton Law: Don’t be a dick.