Sorry this post is a little later than usual…
We’ll kick of this week’s coverage with the silly arcade freebie, Max Gentlemen, from The Men Who Wear Many Hats. I experienced this fun little title at PAX East a couple of years ago. It follows the (made up) adage that the measure of a man is gauged by the size of the stack of hats that he wears. Hold onto your hats and prove your manhood in the face of adversity, flying bottles and birds.
Ubisoft has launched a new free-to-play card battling game with RPG elements set in the Assassin’s Creed universe called Assassin’s Creed Memories. “Equip your character with the most powerful gear and recruit history’s deadliest Assassins and Templars to be your allies as you chase down your targets throughout history”. Sounds like an interesting take on the series that will fit well with the mobile platform.
Big Fish Games is back again this week with a new freemium tile matching game based loosely on Mahjong. Panda PandaMonium has players attempting to rescue Pandas from a hungry dragon by matching pairs of tiles.
While I’m not a fan of Clash of Clans, it is still quite popular. Now it looks like LucasArts is trying to scoop up a piece of that lucrative pie with their latest mobile title, Star Wars: Commander, which ostensibly appears to be Star Wars themed version of the game.
SongPop and MoviePop developers, FreshPlanet are back with not with another trivia game, but instead a puzzle game called BoxPop. You are given an odd shape made up of boxes and traversing the shape using only chess Knight’s L-shaped style of movement, you must try to land on and pop all of the squares on the grid without painting yourself into a corner (so to speak). BoxPop will test your spacial relations and ability to calculate several moves ahead. The game is completely free save for an IAP to remove the ads and to purchase ‘undos’.
Veteran tabletop game designer Mike Elliott (Quarriors, Thunderstone) has just launched his first original mobile game, Letter Pix with his new startup Leiden Labs. Players compete head to head in this puzzle game, taking turns finding words in a 10×10 grid of letters and trying to uncover a hidden picture. The game is pretty fun, like Words With Friends meets the classic Concentration game show (with photos instead of rebus puzzles).
Bulkypix has a couple new titles launching this week, both of which are a bit of a mouthful. Fallin Love – The Game of Love is a charming looking phone rotating puzzle game and Ace Ferrara and the Dino Menace aerial space combat game set in an 80s cartoon universe.
The Firm is a fast-paced arcade stock trading game where you are given a set of rules like BUY when GREEN Stock is going UP, or DON’T BUY when GREEN Stock is going DOWN. And you need to quickly and appropriately sort stock certificates, remembering to adhere to the rules. However new rules get added periodically like BUY when RED Stock is going DOWN and DON’T BUY when RED Stock is going UP. If you are too slow or make too many mistakes, you’ll get FIRED! It’s a fun test of memory, agility and coolness under pressure.
Invaders! From Outer Space is a pretty rad looking retro 3D, campy, B-movie style, black and white take on the arcade classic Space Invaders.
Spooklands is a chaotic, pixelized one-finger survival shooter, with hordes of enemies, plenty of power ups and lots of stuff to shoot…including big bad bosses like the Curupira, the Spider Queen and the Goat Demon. But beware the kickback or you could land right smack dab in the middle of a crowd of baddies.
PAC-MAN Friends is a new, original game featuring everyone favorite power pellet munching, ghost chomping, 3/4 full pie chart that is PAC-MAN. With a choice of either tilt or touch controls, players maneuver PAC-MAN through progressively challenging mazes to rescue his FRIENDS from the GHOSTS’ castle! There are 95 levels spread over 6 different worlds. As you play you unlock nine different friends, each with their own unique abilities. It is a fun and different take on this arcade classic.
Finally, ever since I was a kid I have loved prison escape films, especially the old 1953 William Holden film Stalag 17, which tells the tale of American POWs in German Stalag 17 in the Christmas 1944 and their cunning plan to escape the German prison camp. So needless to say, this final title caught my eye when it came out of nowhere yesterday. Stalag 17 Game appears to be a digital implementation of Gen-X Games’ WWII prison camp escape themed, hand management and set collection card game, Stalag 17. According to BGG, “each player represents one of five countries, and he tries to help his three countrymen escape a prison camp in WWII before the other players can do the same.” I couldn’t find too much info regarding the digital release, but from the screenshots, it appears to offer both local and internet play.
And with that, I’ll escape from this computer get myself some sleep.
 Max Gentlemen |
 Panda PandaMonium |
 BoxPop |
 Letter Pix |
 The Firm |
 Spooklands |
 Invaders! From Outer Space |
 PAC-MAN Friends |
 Stalag 17 Game |
