I love beach holidays, and having lived in seaside towns all my life, the beach is never far from my place of residence. This is probably why I really like the backdrop of Big Pixel Studios’ latest iOS title, Bottle Cap Blitz, which is a beautifully rendered tropical island beach.

Players take on the role of a beach barman who has too much free time on his hands (what can I say….. beach life can be pretty idyllic), and the objective of the game is to flick bottle caps to break as many number of ice cubes in under a minute. You only need one hand to play the game.

It’s that simple but one key inclusion by the development team has made this entire premise an addictive one: Game Center online leaderboards. This plus the really simple gameplay, makes it easy for players to turn on a competitive streak to climb up the charts. I know it got me hooked from the get-go and at the point of writing I’m number 80-ish in the global leaderboard.

Helping the player gain more points are combos and power ups such as frozen cherries and watermelons; these are unlocked (including the ability to chain combos) as you hit new levels. Coins earned during the course of the game can be used to unlock new bottle caps, which is pretty cool if you are an avid bottle cap sharpshooter (the game is bound to turn you into one).

Considering that I had to pry myself from playing the game in order to write this review, it’s safe to say that Bottle Cap Blitz is a case of a casual game done right, with easy to understand and addictive gameplay, competitive elements and a beautiful interface. Nineoverten.com rates Bottle Cap Blitz at a 4.5 out of 5. Highly Recommended.

The game is available on the iTunes App Store for just USD 0.99. Check it out over here: http://itunes.apple.com/app/id569448523. A review code was provided to Nineoverten.com for the purpose of this review.

General Electric, yup, you read that right, that large U.S-based company who has led the field of invention and innovation, has partnered up with Noise to launch a brand new iOS game that lets players discover hidden worlds of knowledge throughout major U.S cities. The game, titled GE Wonderground, looks to combine Foursquare-like elements with quiz questions and is also available online as a web-based game.

Launching in NY, SF, LA, Boston and Chicago, and hosted by  “Wonder Junkie” Jason Silva, GE’s Wonderground is a game of self-expansion designed to reveal obscure, intriguing facts about technology, science and engineering. “We think we know the world around us, but there’s always something more to discover,” said Jason Silva. “Wonderground engages the fundamental parts of our human nature that fuel science-curiosity, inquiry. Players will see what others miss. They will know interesting things they didn’t know. They will in effect, see through walls.”

Players can experience Wonderground either on their desktop or mobile iOS device. There they will be brought into immersive 360-degree panorama fact-finding missions. On mobile iOS devices, players can go on actual missions in the cities, unlocking clues using patented object recognition technology. As players move through the game they will learn everything from GE’s involvement in the invention of Silly Putty, to a research initiative centered around the cloning of a woolly mammoth, to the story behind why portable ultrasonic detectors are being used to detect counterfeit gold.

In celebration of the launch of Wonderground, GE has commissioned the world-renowned tromp l’oiel works of artist John Pugh, who has brought the game to life in a series of visually arresting murals in the 5 launch cities. To play Wonderground, head over to www.gewonderground.com or download Wonderground for free at the App Store: http://goo.gl/RDujL

Polish video game developer/publisher Teyon along with Japanese developer AMZY have announced that the fruit of their collaboration will be out for both the Nintendo 3DS and the Nintendo DSi. The game, titled Clash of Elementalists will be out for Europe and US based gamers this Thursday, April the 11th. The title will be available on the Nintendo 3DS™ hand-held system in the Nintendo eShop for €4.99/$4.99 respectively and on Nintendo DSiWare™ for 500 Nintendo DSi Points.

Battling it out in a fight to prove their superiority, players select from four distinct Elementalists, each representing one of the four planetary elements; earth, fire, water and air. Each character’s fighting style and weaponry reflects their element creating engaging and explosive rounds of powerful and fast action.

There are a total of four modes of game play available and depending on which mode is chosen, the fighting conditions such as the amount of rounds per battle, the battlefield and length of each round are adjustable. Clash of Elementalists also includes the DS Wireless feature, enabling two player matches between two Nintendo DSi™ or Nintendo 3DS systems via a local wireless connection. Here players will be able to battle against their friends in customized battle conditions or for more variety, at random

Sheep are such interesting animals, just as long as they are under the stewardship of a responsible shepherd, they live such cushy lives. HandyGames latest iOS title Clouds & Sheep Premium allow players to become a virtual shepherd, taking care of their flock of sheep. While the sheep just go about their business eating grass and drinking water, being a virtual shepherd turned out to be pretty interesting and fun.

The game gets players to do plenty of tasks, from forming rain clouds to water the pasture, seeding the land with grass and flowers, causing love to blossom among those in your flock (which creates new sheep) to more crazier stuff like jumping on trampolines and going through hoops or fire. It’s pretty busy work and each level is filled with a whole bunch of objectives riding above your tasks.

There’s something quite relaxing though playing the game once you’ve fallen into sync with all the task handling. Handygames hit the jackpot with this kind of casual gameplay as it is fun and rewards well. When done right, you’ll have a whole bunch of happy sheep generating happy stars for you to collect and to spend on buying cool stuff. At the end of each level, players are rated on how many happy, ambivalent and pissed (angry, not drunk) sheep that they have.

Each level happens to be themed and along with Clouds & Sheep Premium’s beautiful 2D graphics, the game’s visuals are certainly easy on the eyes and work to accentuate the gameplay. Nineoverten.com rates Clouds & Sheep Premium at a 4 out of 5, the game is definitely worth checking out. Clouds & Sheep Premium is available on the iTunes App Store for USD 1.99 (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clouds-sheep-premium/id529061013?mt=8).

It is no coincidence that Big Pixel Studios is one of Nineoverten.com’s favourite indie developers on the iOS platform. It’s very hard not to be impressed by their string of hits such as Land-a-Panda, Off the Leash and Meow Meow Happy Fight. They are now back with Bottle Cap Blitz which will be released worldwide on the iTunes App Store on the 11th of April 2013.

Set around a beach bar on a beautiful tropical island, where an easy-going barman loves to show off his impressive bottle cap flicking skills. Players take control of the barman, and over a period of sixty seconds must smash as many ice cubes as possible by flicking bottle caps at them! Designed with a simple tap-to-shoot interface, a single tap on the screen will flick a bottle cap in that direction.

As players progress through the game and reach higher levels, they can unlock a wealth of new features and content including combos, combo chains, game boosts, and an array of extraordinary frozen fruit power-ups! Smashing the watermelon slows down time for a short period, hitting the cherry sets off an explosive bomb, bursting the strawberry activates rapid fire mode, and many many more!

At the end of a game a collection of bonuses are awarded based on the players overall performance, and their score can then be entered into the weekly tournament leaderboards on Game Center. “Bottle Cap Blitz is designed to be extremely easy to play, but with a lot of depth hidden beneath the surface,” said Paul Virapen, Big Pixel Studios Managing Director. “With simple one-handed touch controls and short play sessions, players can come back whenever they have a spare moment to try and beat their own or their friends’ high scores.”

Stay tuned to Nineoverten.com for news of the release and most possibly a review of the game!

Phew, there are not many moments available these days where I can blitz through a real-time strategy title but today was one of those days. I made the most of it by finally finishing StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. It was the final push having made it to the Korhal missions after purchasing and downloading the game a day after launch date.

I paused the game several times though and my wife, being the curious angel that she is decided to tinker around had a go (well, 2 minutes of it) on the mission where you are supposed to destroy the force shield. Needless to say, if I were to left her to her own devices, Kerrigan and gang would be dead before I finish my french toast.

My thoughts on the game? It has been a really fun romp. The enhancements to the controls and UI introduced right before the expansion felt really good and the single player experience from Heart of the Swarm proofed to be different from Wings of Liberty. The gameplay had more in common with that of MOBA titles where hero units ruled. In this case, it was the bad-assed Queen of Blades, re-zerged and pissed like hell. Kerrigan gets an almost RPG-like points system which enhances her HP and upon hitting certain thresholds, unlocks new abilities .

As such, it pays dividends to finish bonus mission objectives as the points offered help unlock her abilities earlier. And here’s the cool part, players get to choose which skills that she gets to carry into each level and since she plays an integral part of each level she’s in, this practically guarantees a different experience each time you start up a level.

The backdrop of Heart of the Swarm is still a romance story (between the star-crossed lovers Jim and Kerrigan), and of revenge. Cliched dialogue make up most part of the conversations but hey, don’t hope too much for a video game storyline. The CGI work stands out as usual and the cut-scenes done using in-game engine are pretty brilliant as well.

Aside from one technical issue (the level loads can be ridiculously long even on an Core i5 MacBook Pro), Heart of the Swarm manages to not feel like a tacked-on expansion, and instead it feels just short of a full game (it is no Brood War, that’s for sure). Not only that, it pushes the typical single player StarCraft experience to parts that have not been well-explored, mirroring Kerrigan’s story into the unknown.

Nineoverten.com rates StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm at a 4.5 out of 5. Review rig: MacBook Pro Core i5, HD 4000 graphics, 8GB of RAM.

MADFINGER Games, the independent mobile games developer responsible for hits such as SHADOWGUN and DEAD TRIGGER, has released a new update for its multiplayer first person action shooter, SHADOWGUN: DeadZone. Update 2.0 offers new game features which promise to extend the current borders of mobile multiplayer game progression. The game is available on both App Store and Google Play.

MADFINGER Games has again heeded to the requests of its fans. The largest update since the release of the game in November 2012 brings new maps, weapons and game content, which was sourced directly from player feedback, including, among others, the “friends” feature. “Now players can invite their friends to Zone Control mode or monitor their game stats, “said Marek Rabas, CEO at MADFINGER Games of the new “friends” feature.

Rookies can look forward to a Special Tutorial mode. The update offers optimizations, bug fixes, as well as support for new gamepads.  In addition, SHADOWGUN: DeadZone Update 2.0 incorporates Boosters (Speed, Armor, Damage, Accuracy, Invisibility), which enable players to experience an entirely new dimension of gameplay.

Finally, Update 2.0 introduces localization for eight new languages (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese). “We worked hard and strived to improve the game across the board. We have always adhered to the principle that our games must first and foremost, entertain us as players. We also pay honest attention to the feedback we receive from our players. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to pack it all into the game,“ explains Marek Rabas.

Moreover, this Friday, April 5th, MADFINGER Games will launch a new website, www.shadowgun-deadzone.com, dedicated to SHADOWGUN: DeadZone.

Hmm… This game is bloody difficult and what the heck am I supposed to do now. Those thoughts came into my mind while I was playing Master of Alchemy: Vengeance Front and getting stuck at…level 3 of this oddball of a physics game. The problem was solved when I realized that I needed to scroll down to see the rest of the level.

It still didn't detract the fact that the game is tough. The nearest comparison I have to MoA:VF, would be Disney's Where's My Water series but instead of just dealing with water particles, you'll need to transmute other types of particles as well, with one type that floats up instead of flowing down. Players drag and drop platforms as well as rotate them in order to get the particles to flow to the destination that they want them to go.

The platforms are a finite resource, so placement is paramount and this alone makes MoA:VF a thinking person's casual game. Aside from the title that obviously suffers from the “Japanese-syndrome-for-throwing-random-words-in-game-titles” (I alway imagine it must be a very liberating exercise for a video game marketer), MoA: VF has plenty going for it.

50 levels with beautiful steampunk graphics and a really smooth physics engine to boot, there's plenty to like about this title. It wouldn't hurt though to make the game a little user friendly; an in-game tutorial would be nice, as well as some visual cues on what to do or use. Nineoverten.com rates Master of Alchemy: Vengeance Front at a 4 out of 5.

The game is available on the iTunes App Store for USD 1.99, check it out over here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/master-alchemy-vengeance-front/id560080981. A review code was provided to Nineoverten.com for the purpose of this review.

Posted with Blogsy

MMORPGs are a dime a dozen these days but it remains one of the most dynamic genres out there, catering for a wide spectrum of players. Hardcore players will always have their World of WarCraft or their Eve Online. Players who do not want a subscription model have their Guild Wars 2 and don’t get me started on the licensed stuff such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings that have fans of the movies/books playing out their favourite roles in those respective universes.

But with so many MMORPGs out in the market, competition is stiff for players’ dollars, time and commitment. And the main thing that acts as a hook to players is the community. Having a nice and friendly community is always a good thing, and such an example would be the community at Soulsplit.com. Soulsplit is a RuneScape Private Server, established since 2008. For those who are not familiar with RuneScape, it’s a browser-based MMORPG and according to Wikipedia it is the world’s largest free MMORPG and the most updated game.

Soulsplit is a market leader in the RSPS arena, with 4,000 players simultaneously on peak time and still rising, and the management has just told us just what makes them the highest quality RSPS out there. The folks behind Soulsplit have worked hard in fixing up the in-game wilderness and at the same time gave players a great platform to form clans. For the player, Soulsplit has different game modes, namely an oldschool mode and enhanced graphics mode for newer players who prefer bells and whistles.

There are also different varieties of XP modes, that can vary from 5,000 XP per hit or 10 XP per hit, so if you are either a player out for a challenge or simply one that enjoys entering Soulsplit’s highly populated wilderness, this is the game for you. With maximum entertainment in mind, this is one MMORPG that deserves your attention. Check out the website right over here: Soulsplit.com

If you are living in the States or Canada and in the market for photobooks and you have an iPad, you may want to consider the Printzel iPad App. Created by a New York company of the same name and recognized as a Friends of eBay company, this app is a showcase of the Printzel API & SDK which enables developers to build apps that allow users to create fully customizable, professionally printed photo books directly in­-app.

The masterstroke would be Printzel will handle the printing, shipping and billing portions of the business, allowing developers to focus on doing what they do best, creating awesome apps tapping on the Printzel API & SDK. Developers can subscribe to Printzel’s e-mail list to receive notification on the open enrollment.

For more information on the SDK, head over here: https://printzel.it/developer. To see the API & SDK in action in the Printzel iPad App, download it for FREE from the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/printzel-app-powered-printing/id620028937?mt=8