Gadgets and Video Games

[ Castlevania Wiki ] At last night’s Indie Game Maker Rant, Tommy Refenes, one half of Team Meat , appropriately let off some steam about Apple’s App Store, saying, “The majority of people who do anything for the App Store work on it and then kind of get screwed over.” Refenes suggested that what the App Store specializes in are cheap ports of established brands, sold on their established names alone, as he compared it to the Tiger LCD handheld games of the late ’80s and early ’90s. “It’s just a way to sell a brand,” Refenes said. “That’s what the Tiger handheld games were, and that’s what I think the App Store is.” To prove a point that the App Store is “kind of shit for most things,” Refenes recounted the experiment he launched with Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman. The two developed a “joke game” called Zits & Giggles (in which players pop pimples) and submitted it to the App Store at the 99 cents price point

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Super Meat Boy dude: ‘App Store is Tiger handheld of this generation’

Click to flash-ify Unless you’re a journalist, analyst or developer, your odds of ever attending the Game Developers Conference are pretty slim. Feel free to live vicariously through the Joystiq crew by checking out the gallery below . No, it’s not nearly as flashy as E3 and PAX’s show floors — except in the case of the MotionCapture.com booth (pictured above), which is quite possibly the flashiest thing we’ve ever seen .

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JPEGs from the frontlines of the GDC 2010 show floor

Speaking during GDC , Peter Molyneux highlighted Lionhead’s strategy for Fable 3 , specifically noting that a franchise will die if it fails to grow. “If we don’t grow as a franchise, If Fable doesn’t get bigger as a franchise,” said Molyneux, “then it will eventually die.” Lionhead is “very happy” with the success of Fable so far, with Molyneux stating that the original Fable sold “about 3 million” copies, while Fable 2 moved approximately 3.5 million. He added that he hopes that 25-30 percent more people will play Fable 3, explaining Lionhead’s plans to craft Fable 3 as more of an action-adventure title — a genre which tends to perform better than RPGs. The overall goal for Lionhead is to sell more than five million copies of Fable 3

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Fable 2 sold 3.5 million copies, Lionhead ‘needs’ 5 million for Fable 3

Now, this is just adorable. The pint-sized, touch-screened adaptation of Call of Duty: World at War ’s Zombie Mode is getting a pint-sized, touch-screened adaptation of the console game’s first piece of DLC: The undead-infested asylum known as Verr

With GDC 2010 and the Independent Games Festival just around the corner, Lazy 8 Studios has released an iPhone version of COGS , its unique 3D puzzle title that’s up for an IFG award for Excellence in Design. The tile-sliding game is not only unique in that it’s played on the sides of a cube, but its tiles feature working gears, pipes and other mechanical pieces which must be connected in order to complete a functioning gizmo (like the jack-in-the-box above). Chillingo, the game’s publisher on iPhone, has also taken the increasingly popular approach of releasing COGS for 99

We couldn’t care less about our email, videos and music, all we wanted to know is if the newly announced iPad could play games. The answer? If you’ve been spending a fortune in $0.99 chunks on iPhone games, you’ve already got a big iPad library. The device, as just announced by Apple, plays all your iPhone apps unmodified, out of the box.

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iPad plays all iPhone games and apps

Apple’s App Store has attained over 100,000 fart simulators apps and blown by the two billion download mark. GI.biz reports that games make up 19.6 percent of the store’s content. EA Mobile VP Travis Boatman notes that the store, which is now available in 77 countries, has allowed his company to make high quality games that “have been a huge success with customers.” If Gameloft’s sales figures are any indication, the App Store shows no signs of slowing down in the game department. Now, if only that alleged iPhone app piracy rate could be brought under control. iPhone App Store tops 100K items, 2 billion downloads originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:45:00 EST

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iPhone App Store tops 100K items, 2 billion downloads

Capcom is helping the terrorists win with the release of BombLink on iPhone and iPod touch. The $2 app basically asks players to organize bombs in such a way that the explosive devices detonate with the biggest “boom” possible. Talk about irresponsible programming. Seriously, next thing you know there’ll be games where you can pick up hookers, then kill them and take their money

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Capcom places BombLink on iPhone

Variety has revealed that Atari plans to publish a game based on the Project Runway reality show. Set to debut in 2010, the game will feature host Heidi Klum and the ever prim and proper Tim Gunn, though the extent of their involvement is still under wraps. Here’s hoping Gunn will lend his delightful vocal cadence to the project. The game has players taking a turn behind the virtual sewing machine, tasking them with designing fashions and properly outfitting models with hair and makeup. Once that’s done, players sashay down the catwalk as the models themselves

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Project Runway game announced

Were you happy to hear that C64 , the iPhone Commodore 64 emulator app, had been approved by Apple and finally seen release ? We were too. Try to remember that feeling, then, as we tell you that after having been rejected, and then finally accepted, it’s been pulled from the App Store. When developer Manomio learned that the C64’s BASIC interpreter was the problem the first time, it removed obvious access, but left the interpreter in the software so it could be re-enabled later if Apple changed its mind.

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iPhone Commodore 64 app removed from App Store