GDC 2010: Call of Duty: World at War Zombies postmortem
March 10, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Gaming, Retail, Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store
The most major feature of the game’s development, he said, was the decision last year around this time to sit down and work on prototyping for about six weeks. Nowadays, there are a few successful first person shooters around the App Store, but last year, FPSes were still a new genre for the iPhone, so the team decided to really brainstorm how one would work on a touchscreen.
Continue reading GDC 2010: Call of Duty: World at War Zombies postmortem
GDC 2010: Call of Duty: World at War Zombies postmortem originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
GDC 2010: Call of Duty: World at War Zombies postmortem originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Steph Tirion, creator of Eliss, annouces Faraway
March 8, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Gaming, Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store, SDK
Steph Tirion is an excellent game designer who I’ve had the good fortune to meet a few times. He first released a great game called Eliss on the App Store and he’s now announced the second game he’s been working on, called Faraway. Eliss was a terrific little arcade game that made great use of the iPhone’s touchscreen, and Tirion says that while his first game dealt with “planets and space management in sectors, Faraway will be about constellations and infinite space travel.” Sounds exciting. The game will be playable at GDC this week, so I’ll definitely make time to run by and check it out.
Tirion has also announced a new company to represent and sell his iPhone games, and he’s calling it LITTLE–EYES. It’s really great to see a very smart, independent developer come into his own like on a platform like the iPhone — there’s really no other mainstream gaming platform out there that lets developers really jump in headfirst and release experimental games like these to a a mainstream market. We’ll keep an eye out at GDC this week for all kinds of indie developers making it big. While it’s cool that Valve and other larger companies are finally coming around, we have to be sure not to forget developers like this either.
Steph Tirion, creator of Eliss, annouces Faraway originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Steph Tirion, creator of Eliss, annouces Faraway originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Judge suspends Apple/Nokia lawsuit pending ITC investigation
March 5, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Hardware, Software, Apple
With all of the furor around the gigantic patent lawsuit that Apple dropped on HTC this week, you might be forgiven for forgetting about the first big patent smackdown of the year, the lawsuit that Nokia laid at Apple’s door. But a judge in Delaware hasn’t — he ordered a suspension to both the case and its countersuit while the International Trade Commission works out the complaints between the two companies.
Clearly Nokia and Apple have it out for one another, but apparently they’re going to take it one step at a time. Once the ITC has completed its probe, which was scheduled to take 45 days after it agreed to perform the investigation on February 22nd, then the lawsuit will presumably move forward. That’s if it’s still on and not settled by then, although Nokia seems in it to win it, and Apple apparently has enough bandwidth (and legal fees) to pick two fights at once anyway. So bring it, ITC, and then let’s get this show on the road.
[via Macworld]
Judge suspends Apple/Nokia lawsuit pending ITC investigation originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Judge suspends Apple/Nokia lawsuit pending ITC investigation originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Boston creates app to report road problems
March 3, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Software, Freeware, iTunes, iPhone
Since moving to LA, I haven’t quite had to deal with the potholes that Spring in Chicago usually brings (not that roads are any better out here, but at least they don’t have to deal with all of the freezing and thawing). But despite the yearly flat tires and ruined alignments, Chicago hasn’t gone quite as far as Boston, where the city government has developed not one but two apps to enable its citizens to report on potholes and other city issues.
Citizens Connect is an app developed late last year by the city that enables locals to report graffiti, potholes, broken streetlights, and other urban issues in the Boston area, and now they’re working on a new app, nicknamed BUMP (for Boston Urban Mechanic Profiler), that will automatically transmit road conditions to a central database using the iPhone’s accelerometer and data connection. That seems tough to do with all of the extra noise that must come from an accelerometer, but they are working with a researcher from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, so maybe they will be able to pull it off. Interesting to see metropolitan areas like this using newer technology to keep an eye on what’s up in their city. Of course, actually fixing the potholes will take a little more work, but knowing what’s wrong is helpful.
Boston creates app to report road problems originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Boston creates app to report road problems originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Assassin’s Creed II multiplayer, Rayman 2 out now on the iPhone
March 2, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Gaming, Software, Freeware, iPhone, App Store
Two major league games have hit the App Store already this week, one of them for the surprise price of free. Ubisoft has released the multiplayer version of their Assassin’s Creed II game on the App Store, and it’s available for free for the first 48 hours. The game’s a top-down multiplayer game that has you walking around the world of the console version, both targeting other players and being targeted yourself. All the reports say it’s definitely worth a try, and if you can catch it before they raise the price back up (sounds like Ubisoft is trying to find a place for their releases), you should.
And as expected, Rayman 2 is also out on the App Store — it’s a port of the 3D Playstation platformer that was actually a Ubisoft property, but as you can see from the trailer above, this one’s been ported by Gameloft. As with most iPhone platformers, the game uses virtual controls, but Touch Arcade says they work just fine. The save system is the biggest issue — your iPhone is not the best platform for playing games for long stretches of time, and any game that kicks you back out to a menu if you happen to step away for a second will cause frustration eventually. Still, it sounds like a solid platformer port, and there are certainly fans of those out there. The game is $6.99 on the App Store right now.
Assassin’s Creed II multiplayer, Rayman 2 out now on the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Assassin’s Creed II multiplayer, Rayman 2 out now on the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Phoenix Wright, Hexen II coming to the iPhone
February 28, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Gaming, Software, Apple, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch
Good news for fans of good games: the terrific DS courtroom simulator (which, trust me, sounds much less fun than it actually is) Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney is coming to the iPhone, and Slide to Play has posted some hands-on video. The game takes the two DS screens and stacks them on top of each other rather than converting the game into a landscape version, so it’s basically a straight port of the DS game. It’d be interesting to see a more iPhone-specific version of the game (maybe something that uses the camera or the accelerometer to show off evidence in the courtroom), but we’ll take just the port, too — if you haven’t played any of the Phoenix Wright games but enjoy a good adventure yarn, you’re in for a treat. The game should be out “soon.”
Hexen II is on its way to the iPhone as well, and Touch Arcade has a few screens and video of that one. I was much more of a Quake fan, but Hexen, with its medieval setting and RPG elements placed in the same game engine, had its share of followers back in the day, too. Unfortunately, Vimov doesn’t yet have the rights to Hexen II — they’re just working with an open-sourced version of the engine. To actually release the data on the App Store, they’ll need to make a deal with Activision, so we’ll have to wait and see if that can happen before you can start hacking and slashing through the world of the Serpent Riders again.
Phoenix Wright, Hexen II coming to the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Phoenix Wright, Hexen II coming to the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Interview with the creator of the Apple startup sound
February 26, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Hardware, Multimedia, Software, Apple, Developer
We met them while they were shooting on the Apple Campus, and now the creators of the Dutch site onemorething.nl have posted their interview with Apple sound designer Jim Reekes (who also appears in Welcome To Macintosh). They met up with Reekes while at Macworld in San Francisco a little while back — he’s the guy that programmed most of the sound in the early days, including the famous Mac startup chime and the legendary “sosumi” chime. What’s most interesting to me is all of the math behind it — while making music is traditionally seen as an art, there’s a lot of technical know how and information that actually went into the sound’s creation. Essentially, you’re creating a beep that has to represent a brand, and that mix of technical data with artistic representation is fascinating.
Plus, Reekes definitely seems like a guy who’s been around both the technical and musical blocks a few times before, and it’s cool to hear him pontificate on all of the hard work he did back in the day. It’s also interesting to see someone who has such a personal tie to a sound that is so ubiquitous and means so much to so many people — an “ear-con,” he calls it. Very nice interview.
Interview with the creator of the Apple startup sound originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Interview with the creator of the Apple startup sound originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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