Coin pushers: gateway gambling machine, disappointing old-fashioned seaside arcade amusement, or terribly modern entertainment sensation? It’s looking bizarrely like the last of those. There’s daytime ITV1 quiz show Tipping Point, in which Ben Shephard has an only slightly easier job than Noel Edmonds on Deal Or No Deal in convincing the viewer that there’s appreciable …
Coming from the studio that gave the world both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, it’s only natural to have high expectations for Record Run. These two games spawned countless sequels and soulless clones until the market imploded pretty much over night. Luckily Harmonix managed to survive unscathed. Well, maybe luck had little to do with …
The obvious thing would be to write about Dsmvwld in the manner of its puzzles, omitting the vowels. On the plus side, that would end up looking a tiny bit like something uttered by Zombie Dave. But it would also be unhelpful to the point of perversion. Your task is simple: put the vowels back …
For a game that’s resoundingly simple, Lines (or Lines – by That Wonderful Lemon Co. to give it its full name) is tricky to explain. It’s a ‘match-five’ puzzler in which rows of coloured dots make their way down a cylinder. They descend at an incredibly fast rate, and just a few precious seconds are …
Have you seen just how many Flappy Bird clones there are on the App Store now? You don’t need to, because Stuart Dredge has been keeping a slightly obsessive eye on it for The Guardian. In short: lots. If Nyamyam had been so inclined, they might have renamed Tengami ‘Flappy Paper’. They might have got …
Back in the ‘90s, Bullfrog was one of the biggest names in PC gaming. Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Magic Carpet, Syndicate and Populous became instant classics overnight, but it was Dungeon Keeper that turned the fantasy genre upside, making the player the bad guy instead of the hero. The game’s tag line “It’s Good to …
Talk about an easy act to follow – the last RoboCop game was from the notorious Superman 64 developers Titus Interactive way back in 2003. The only thing you need to know about that game was that it was their last before going bankrupt. Even if this mobile movie tie-in was a clone of Space …
You may be relieved to hear that we believe chances of Activision eventually releasing this kart racer on consoles are pretty slim. At least not as a full price retail release, anyway. This is a racer so heavily structured around microtransactions that if you were to remove them the entire thing would fall to pieces, …
If smothering Star Wars all over the Angry Birds franchise helped Rovio’s avian associates to make even more money, then why shouldn’t the license be applied to other mobile games? Ten minutes later and we’re still trying to think of a valid reason. NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower may not be quite as well known as Angry …
Fist of Awesome has been one huge charm offensive: from the early animated GIF screenshots, through the doubling-its-target Kickstarter, to designer Nicoll Hunt’s beard. It’s been either: (a) a cleverly orchestrated PR campaign; (b) a demonstration of the benefits as an indie developer of being a bit different; or (c) proof that people really really …
It would seem that movie tie-ins have a new home in the form of the App Store. Given that they’ve always had a cheap and throwaway feel to them, this suits us just fine. To be fair, this match-three puzzler doesn’t look all that cheap. It’s as colourful as you may expect for a game …
Does a game about a giant boulder bounding its way down a mountainside need a plot? Probably not, but it has one regardless. To wit: a precariously placed boulder on top of a mountain wishes to be reunited with its partner – another boulder which is presently being chiselled into a statue for a town’s …
It’s About Time… that a developer put some thought into their game’s subtitle, rather than randomly picking a word like ‘Revelations’ or ‘Requiem’ from a dictionary. What pleases us so much about Plants vs Zombies 2’s subheading is that it works on three different levels. The curiously likeable zombies first shuffled onto the App Store …
If you’ve worked in an office over the last decade or so, you’ve probably been hit at some point by the deluge of Excel quizzes. They were fun! Sort of. Little screen caps from films or scraps of sweet wrapper or whatever, and you have to guess what they are. The whole office gets involved …
You know when you’ve been playing a game of an evening, and you can still see it in your mind’s eye when you go to sleep? Match-three puzzlers have a habit of doing it to me. Well, Garfield isn’t an obvious choice for an endless runner, so Namco-Bandai have had to set Wild Ride in …