While some people dream of being President, and some people dream of being athletes, the truly cool dream of being rock stars. Well, now you can live out that dream with TourStar, an iOS game that let’s you live the rock & roll lifestyle. But in talking to Brandon Pankey, the managing partner of Music Players Group LLC and one of the game’s co-creators, it seems there’s more to TourStar than seeing a million faces and rockin’ them all.
In the movie Guardians Of The Galaxy, a kid named Peter Quill is kidnapped by aliens and taken into space where, as a grown up, he becomes, “the legendary outlaw Star-Lord.” Which may sound cool, but it means that he may never have played a game of pinball. Good thing he can make up for it with Zen Studios’ Guardians Of The Galaxy table, which is now available for Zen Pinball 2 on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and Vita; Pinball FX 2 for Xbox 360 and PCs via steam (as well as Xbox One when that version of PFX2 comes out in August); and Zen Pinball for iOS, Android, and Amazon devices.
Released in 1987, Shadowgate was one of the original point & click adventure games. Now this fantasy game is getting an updated upgrade from the original creators. One of whom, design director Karl Roelofs, recently explained how the game works, and how it will work differently than you remember it, when his company Zojoi releases it this August on PC and Mac (and later on iOS and Android).
When your studio is called SleepNinja Games, your publisher is Cartoon Network Games, and your new game is called Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, you better have a sense of humor about yourself. Thankfully, that seems to be the case with Justin Baldwin, who identifies himself as the Arty-fart McGoo / Animation Dood / Overall Design Person’r on Cake, and his cohort Alex Atkins, Cake’s self-identified “Head Writerererer/Designer.”
In many tower defense games, your towers are defended and attacked by characters of the sci-fi or fantasy persuasion. But in the iOS tower defense game Toy Rush, your attackers and defenders are toys…adorable, adorable toys. I spoke to John Comes, the design director from Uber Entertainment and the project lead for Toy Rush, about what inspired this game, why they went this cute route, and is that a shark with legs and a top hat?
With a name like TownCraft, you might expect this crafting and village building game to be completely unoriginal shovelware made by a couple of unscrupulous developers who have no problem ripping off someone else’s hard work. But TownCraft is neither a Minecraft clone nor a riff on Animal Crossing. Instead, it takes elements of both and other games — games that help inspire Minecraft and Animal Crossing — to make an interesting hybrid.
With TownCraft, now available on iPhones and Macs — and, apparently, coming to PCs at some point — after already been available on iPad, I spoke to lead designer Leigh Harris and his brother, lead programmer Rohan Harris, of Flat Earth Games about how TownCraft came to be, how it came to be on iPhones and Macs, and why they couldn’t come up with a better name.
One of the irritating things about being a game journalist is when developers say their game is unique when it clearly isn’t. “Yeah, it’s a sci-fi first-person shooter, and you wear power armor and talk to a blue hologram lady…but it’s nothing like Halo.” Which is why it was a relief to interview Blast Zone! executive producer Christopher Pfeiffer about his — by his own admission — Bomberman-esque game for iOS, Android, and Amazon devices.
In making the rhythm game Jungle Rumble!! for iOS devices and, soon, Android ones as well, the good people at Disco Pixel could’ve had you controlling lions or tigers or giraffes, oh my. But in talking to Disco Pixel’s Trevor Stricker, he revealed that, no, it was always going to be monkeys. Sweet, sweet monkeys.
It was recently announced that, because of the upcoming movies, all of the previous Star Wars video games were no longer cannon.
But if you want to play some Star Wars games that will never be disavowed, you can’t go wrong with Star Wars Pinball: Heroes Within, the addictive new tables Zen Studios are bringing to their pinball games on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, PCs via Steam, Macs, iOS devices, Android smart phones and tablets, and Amazon’s Kindle. (What, no Virtual Boy!?!)