Yesterday Popcap announced that it will be porting its fastest-selling Mac/PC game in the company’s history, Plants vs Zombies, over to iPhone before the year is over.
Not familiar with this game? You should be, it’s highly addicting gameplay not only caters to hardcore tower defense fans but to casual gamers alike.
Play five game modes: Adventure, Mini-Games, Puzzle, Survival, plus the stress-free Zen Garden
Conquer all 50 levels of Adventure mode — through day, night and fog, in a swimming pool and on the rooftop
Battle 26 types of zombies including pole-vaulters, snorkelers and “Zomboni” drivers
Earn 49 powerful perennials and collect coins to buy a pet snail, power-ups and more!
Sadly, no exact release date or pricing has been announced but Zombie lovers rejoice. It will be here soon enough.
What are the top 5, must-have board games currently available on the iPhone? Many of you have taken a liking to our Top 5 Must-Have Jailbreak Apps features, so TiPb figured why not expand the series and cover some of the better apps directly from Apple’s own iTunes App Store as well? So that is exactly what we did. Today we have compiled what we feel are the current top 5 must-have board game apps available. For the full run down, follow us after the break!
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Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they’re fair game.
So who’s on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!
Apps for Less is Jeremy’s turf, but we just got a few extra, time-sensitive tips we wanted to share with you for the weekend, so please bear with my less than Bad Ash fill-in attempt.
First up is ConvertBot [iTunes link], which is now totally FREE for a limited time.
Next up, ID software has a sale going in honor of QuakeCon 2009, discounting Doom Resurrection [iTunes link] to $2.99 and Wolfenstein Classic [iTunes link] to $0.99 from now until Sunday. (Thanks Pete for the head’s up!)
If you see any other great weekend deals, let us know in the comments, or send them Jeremy’s way any time for inclusion in a future Apps for Less!
Blue Skies [iTunes Link] is one of the first notable iPhone 3GS-specific applications to hit Apple’s App Store, and at a great low introductory price of $0.99.
A helicopter shooter that was orginally introduced one year ago by RockingPocketGames, this version of Blue Skies is identical to the original version in terms of gameplay, but as would be expected with the beefier processing power in the iPhone 3GS, the graphics have gotten a nice overhaul.
The 3GS enhanced version makes use of the pixel shaders that are ONLY found in the new iPhone 3GS. It has per pixel bump mapping and amazing dynamic animated water that demonstrates the true power of the new iPhone 3GS!
If you currently have the original version along with an iPhone 3GS, is it worth your $0.99 to update? Depends on much you value better graphics in your games. Now if you have never played this shooter and have a 3GS, for $0.99 you are getting a good deal for your money. To see the graphical improvements firsthand, be sure to download Blue Skies Lite [iTunes link].
The big question remains, do you appreciate an iPhone 3GS specific version, or do you think it’s finally breaking the platform compatibility?
Warning that its profits may decline, Wii and DS manufacturer Nintendo played the “current economic conditions” card but also laid a new one on the gaming table — increased competition thanks to Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch.
The newly launched Nintendo DSi is seen as a partial response to Apple’s new gaming model, according to Electronista, which includes an on-device digital App Store, rather than the cartridge based physical media traditional gaming companies have thus far preferred.
Still, if the next edition of Mario has an Apple or Steve Jobs looking boss level, we’ll know Nintendo is taking it seriously…
Eurogamer spoke to Johnny Two Shoes (The Heist, Banana Dash), Normalware (Bebot) and Firemint (Flight Control) about how Sony’s new PSPgo platform may compete with the iPhone, and the answers were interesting:
After an 80% price cut to PSP dev tool charges, bring the price down to $1500) it’s still much more expensive than Apple’s $99.
Developers can’t target the existing PSP install base of 50 million, PSPgo has only just been released, and Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch have an install base of over 40 million devices.
However, Apple growing the download gaming market and PSP games traditionally being bigger and longer (as opposed to casual iPhone gaming) were seen as positives for Sony.
“In the end,” Maxwell Scott-Slade concludes, “the consumer wins for choice and developers win for a more direct access to their audience.”
Is this a triumph? Portal running on an iPhone? Not really, according to Gizmodo:
The video says the demo was made using the Unity Engine, which means they took some Portal assets and made a small demo with them. They didn’t take the full game and squish it onto the iPhone; what you see is probably the entire thing. There’s no way the Source Engine is running on the 3G. Maybe the 3GS, but not the 3G.
Not yet! But we figure they’ll keep on trying until they run out of cake… or Valve pulls an ID an actually releases a game for the new 40+ million unit iPhone/iPod touch platform. Right Valve?
According to Business Insider, just 1 year later, Apple’s iTunes App Store has made the iPhone the hottest gaming platform on earth:
Apple became not only the hottest mobile platform in the world — which around 15,000 developers have made software for, and all of its major rivals have tried to replicate — but arguably the hottest gaming platform in the world. No other platform has had such a rush of developer and consumer interest in the last year.
BI highlight big name developers like EA, Sega, and Gameloft jumping into the iPhone, but also great new studios forming around it like ngmoco. And with iPhone 3.0 and its 1000 new APIs like P2P gaming and in-app purchases, they suggest we might not have seen anything yet…
Apple’s iTunes App Store launched on July 11, 2008 alongside the iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0. Now, just a few days shy of its first birthday, iTunes is getting ready to celebrate by showcasing some of Apple’s favorite iPhone (and iPod touch) apps [iTunes link].
Split into two categories of 30, apps [iTunes link] and games [iTunes link], Apple’s picks are as diverse as they are interesting and seem to cover the gamut from major development studios to indies, premium priced to free, and as they put it are:
