The engine that powers Battlefield and Need for Speed is coming to “all major mobile platforms” in the form of Frostbite Go, according to Electronic Arts’ (EA) Frostbite website.

The announcement is an indicator of EA’s increasing commitment to mobile platforms, so expect more of its games on your iPhone and Android devices. The Frostbite engine also means improved graphics and performance for mobile devices, according to The Unofficial Apple Weblog. This may also be a benefit to developers familiar with the Frostbite workflow. Rather than adapt to a new engine, the teams can work within an environment they are familiar with.

The announcement doesn’t make it clear if Frostbite Go will come to Windows Mobile and BlackBerry. GamesBeat has reached out to EA for specifics on what “major” mobile platforms entails as well as any word on possible launch games.

Electronic Arts does not license the engine, so all Frostbite games come from its internal developers.

EA isn’t the only developer pushing for console-grade graphics and engines on mobile. Back in March, we learned that Epic Games is adapting its Unreal Engine 4 for portable devices.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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SAN FRANCISCO — Today, Wooga revealed for the first time in its four-year history that it turned a profit. Revenues are split evenly between mobile and web games.

The Berlin-based developer is a private company, so it wouldn’t go into further detail about its financial situation. Chief executive Jens Begemann (pictured above) added that “we don’t want to be chased” by quarterly results. It’s investing the money back into the company to “innovate” in new genres and grow its audience.

“I’m focused on our 20-20 vision to make games available to [people who] play games every day,” he said.

Wooga targets devices with more than 1 billion users. When Begemann and his cofounders started in 2009, that platform was the PC. More specifically, it chose Facebook — since then, Wooga has become the third-largest social gaming company on the site. The company shifted its focus to mobile when smartphones crossed the 1 billion mark. And in just two years, Begemann believes that tablets will also join the club.

But the company isn’t waiting around, as some of its games are already available on the iPad. In March, it will release a version of the popular gem-matching game Diamond Dash to Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Wooga currently has 50 million active monthly players across all of its platforms and products.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Those gifted with new mobile devices this holiday season have a world of fun awaiting their fingertips — maybe too much fun. Thousands of games have been made available over the years, especially since iOS and Android have increased in popularity, making the selection process frustrating for those navigating Google Play, the App Store, or the Amazon App Store for the first time. Well, consider this list of the best mobile games your saving grace. We’ve compiled a source for mobile gaming based on user friendliness, accessibility, and more importantly, fun factor. Whether you have an iPhone, iPad, Galaxy device, or Kindle Fire, these games are waiting for your attention. Think of this list as a beginner’s guide to gaming on your mobile device.

Plants vs. Zombies

Developer: PopCap Games
Platform: Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore

Plants vs. Zombies still stands as one of the more addictive games I’ve played. Ever. The object of PvZ is to protect your home from a hoard of zombies that hungrily make their way across your yard. All that stands in their way are plants curiously armed for your war against the living dead.

Specifically, the plants are equipped with a variety of weapons, such as projectile peas. Other plants eat zombies while cherry bombs blow them to deader than dead bits. The more plants you create, the better your chance at survival. You must position your plants strategically, or the game will end rather quickly.

Cut the Rope

Developer: Chillingo Ltd.
Platform: Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore

Cut the Rope is disgustingly cute. How so? A piece of candy hangs on a rope over an adorable little monster, and the player must swipe to break the candy free and drop it into the creature’s mouth. His smile is priceless. He’s a happy, goofy-looking little beast named Om Nom.

Cut the Rope’s puzzles are mostly based on physics and timing. For instance, the candy may be hanging from two or three ropes. The order in which you cut them becomes a strategic decision, and timing a cut perfectly so that the treat lands in Om Nom’s mouth can prove tricky. Some of the tougher parts incorporate elements such as hungry spiders that also want the treat, forcing the player to act quickly while still trying to carefully plan moves. More often than not, you’ll retry a level in the hope of feeding the little guy a candy so you don’t have to see his pouty face. It’s heartbreaking, and you can’t help but feel overwhelmed with guilt every time you fail.

Infinity Blade and Infinity Blade II

Developer: Chair Entertainment
Platform: Apple App Store

Infinity Blade is the first iOS game developed using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, and it looks beautiful. It’s truly a showcase of what can be accomplished visually on a mobile device with the right resources, and it’s not far from what current consoles are capable of.

You walk through a castle fighting monsters using simple left, right, and swipe gestures to dodge, block, or attack your enemy. These controls work well with touch screens because they don’t rely on precision finger movements. Instead, the player must focus on timing and pattern recognition to win. It’s Punch-Out!! with shields, swords, ogres, and knights.

Angry Birds series

Developer: Rovio
Platform: Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore

I admit that every time a new Angry Birds game hits the download market, I pretend I’m too cool to be interested. How many times can Rovio reskin the same game? Then I pick it up, and I’m hooked. Angry Birds is arguably the most popular mobile game around right now, and for good reason. It’s no wonder the developers keep releasing sequels and making Angry Birds available on every thinkable platform because even when you want to hate it, you have to admit it’s fun.

The object of the birds’ anger are evil green pigs that have stolen their eggs. The player’s job is to slingshot the birds into said pigs’ fortresses, rendering them dead and bacon. You have a limited number of birds per level, and you must find clever ways to efficiently eliminate all the pigs before advancing. The puzzles are physics-based, so players have to calculate distance and trajectory to win. You’ll often find that what was supposed to be a few minutes of playtime can become an hour or more of slaughtering hogs and cursing at the touch screen.

Draw Something

Developer: Omgpop
Platform: Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore

Draw Something was one of the first mobile games to bring a social element to the general public thanks to its Facebook integration. In fact, the social network is very likely the reason Draw Something became so huge. It’s easy to sign up for because most of us have a Facebook account. It’s also very accessible to nongamer types since drawing is a basic skill, which eliminates the need to learn complicated control schemes or rules to enjoy the game.

One player is given a word and must do his best to represent it in a drawing by using his device’s touch screen. Then, he sends it to the other person, who must guess the word based on his (usually horrible) illustration. You can be playing against several friends at once, and it’s not unusual to have 10 or more games going at any given time. Keep in mind that it may be hours or even days before a friend gets back to you with a reply. The only downside to any of these social games is that you are forced to rely on others if you want to play. Once the initial popularity dwindles, it’s a little harder to find opponents.

Rayman Jungle Run

Developer: Ubisoft
Platform: Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon Appstore

Ubisoft is one of those top-tier gaming companies that wasn’t afraid even early on to invest in development and publishing for mobile platforms. Rayman Jungle Run was picked by Apple as its best game of 2012. Luckily, Rayman is multiplatform, so Android users don’t have to sit this one out.

Rayman Jungle Run is what’s called an autorun game. The character — in this case, Rayman — continuously runs through the levels. The movement is out of your control. It’s the player’s job to jump, glide,, or attack at the right moment. This genre has grown in popularity on mobile devices because it brings elements of traditional run and jump games (often called platformers) yet keeps gameplay simple enough so that users aren’t annoyed by sloppy touch-screen controls.

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Armed with only her parasol, author Jane Austen doesn’t look like a formidable fighter. But that didn’t stop her from beating my magnifying glass-wielding champion Agatha Christie with a torrent of three-, four-, and five-letter words. In some weird way, I felt like this was my punishment for not finishing Pride and Prejudice back in college.

Developed by Feel Every Yummy, Writer Rumble is a fighting game that pits some of the literary world’s most renowned writers against one another in mortal combat. But instead of whacking each other on the head with their fists, they attack each other with the most powerful weapon of all: words. A board full of random letters determine your moves, and you must slide your finger to form as many words as you can in quick succession before your opponent can do the same.

Out now for iOS devices at $0.99 and early next year for Android, Writer Rumble is also the first title published under GameFly Games, the newest business venture for a company usually known for its long-running games rental service. It’s a solid debut, as Writer Rumble’s quirky premise makes it stand out from the glut of other word games on the App Store.

What you’ll like

Tense multiplayer matches
While a single-player survival mode, where you try to last as long as you can against waves of increasingly powerful monsters, is available, it’s merely the training ground for the competitive online battles in the “Fight with Words” multiplayer. Like in other fighting games, your strategy starts by choosing the right character. Each writer comes with his own arsenal of power-ups that regenerates over time, and this can drastically alter the battlefield for a few seconds: One forces your opponent to spell backward, another triples the damage points for your next word, and a particularly nasty one flips the entire letter board upside down.

When your opponent gets into a groove by unleashing consecutive attacks and tricky power-ups, it’s easy to slip up and cause your own demise: Every time you misspell a word in multiplayer or make up one that doesn’t exist, the game slices off a part of your health bar. Once you get over the slight learning curve, however, matches become incredibly close, boiling down to who can recognize and correctly spell different words the fastest. And if you have an iPad, you can share the panic-inducing agony with another person next to you in splitscreen multiplayer (pictured above).

Sense of style
Writer Rumble’s homage to literature extends far beyond the battles. You flip through the menus much like a book, with each area introducing a new “page.” Quotes from these authors (as well as others not in the game, such as Ernest Hemingway and Sun Tzu) keep you busy during loading screens. And the Saturday morning cartoon versions of the writers are charming as you can find direct references to their line of work in the way they look and act. Hell, even H. P. Lovecraft’s creepy Cthulhu monster looks adorable.

What you won’t like

Technical problems
Writer Rumble crashed a few times on my iPhone 4S, forcing me to reset the game. And during some multiplayer matches, the screen locked up after receiving pop-up notifications of someone else wanting to start a different match. In those cases, I was unable to use the letter board at all, and I had to wait until I lost or quit the app myself for it to work again. It didn’t happen too often, but it was enough to be annoying, especially in battles I knew I should have won.

Conclusion

I don’t normally obsess over stats like kill-to-death ratios in multiplayer games, but my three wins and 14 losses in Writer Rumble feels devastating. And I can barely look at the insane survival scores people keep posting on the leaderboards. I like to think this is because some players have superhuman reflexes or an encyclopedic knowledge of odd words and not because I simply suck at it.

The good news is that Writer Rumble is fun no matter what side you fall on. With an art style that easily won over this English major’s heart and battles that keep you guessing until the end, it’s certainly one of the most action-packed word games you’ll find on your mobile device.

Score: 80/100

Writer Rumble is available now for iOS devices on the App Store for $0.99, with an Android release planned for 2013. The publisher provided GamesBeat with an iOS download code for the purpose of this review. 

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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In what appears to be an inevitable move, Electronic Arts has released a new version of its Madden Football game built specifically for mobile devices and social networks.

The latest installment of the franchise, Madden NFL 13 Social, is available on iPhones, iPads, and Facebook today. The video game mega-developer bills it as a “complete” turn-based multiplayer game experience for people of all skill levels, however Madden Social focuses entirely on offensive plays. It’s also a football game, so most people who download it know what to expect.

Madden Social offers touch-screen controls to move your players in the iOS versions, while the Facebook game gives you the option of choosing offensive strategies and watching the results via a simulated engine. It also lets you toggle between iOS and Facebook versions. That means when you’re sitting in a traffic jam playing on your iPhone, you can pick the game up again later at home via Facebook or iPad.

Players can set their team lineups through an auction house system to assemble a custom roster of NFL players. Madden NFL 13 Social uses a card-based management system that’s similar to the Madden Ultimate Team for consoles. Various portions of the gameplay grant you coins that you can use to buy new stuff to improve your team. I’m sure this will also eventually give way to an option to purchase more coins using real money or Facebook credits.

Madden Social is available for free via Apple App Store or through the official EA Madden Facebook page. Check out a gallery of screenshots from the game below.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sailor Ben isn’t your ordinary kind of teddy bear. If his thick, scowling unibrow and the heart tattooed on his chest don’t tip you off, the bandaged stump where his right leg once was certainly will. Oh, and he also has a bit of a drinking problem (don’t worry, it’s just root beer).

The teddy bear amputee is just one of the colorful Super Critters you’ll play as in Atari’s Super Bunny Breakout, the latest iteration of the developer’s Breakout series of games that started with the original arcade release in 1976. Published by Zynga as part of the Zynga Partners for Mobile program, Super Bunny Breakout retains the same basic concept of smashing things with a ball but blends it with characters and a storyline that wouldn’t look out of place in a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s “coming soon” for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch for $0.99 and hitting Android devices at a later date.

You start off as Rodney the bunny, who (as the teaser trailer reveals) frees himself from his cage and goes on a crusade to rescue the countless other animals in the E.A.T. (Evil Animal Testing) Labs. At first, he will serve as your “ball,” and in true brick-breaking tradition, you’ll have to ricochet him off of walls and the moving platform you control to smash all the objects in a level. Peppered throughout the stages are helpless animals still trapped in their cages. If you want to earn the top score (represented by three stars) and receive a large payout of coins, you’ll have to save them all.

Breaking away from tradition

Sometimes these levels contain other Super Critters, such as Sailor Ben, and after you free them, they permanently join Rodney as part of your roster. Each of them come with their own backstory and reason for being at the labs — illustrated with funny storyboard cutscenes — as well as special powers that you can activate by double-tapping the screen while they’re in the air. Rodney swirls around to punch everything in sight, Sailor Ben shoots a cannon ball, Pickles the cactus unleashes its pointy spines, and the cute Marshmallow Twins super-size themselves for extra damage. You can only use these attacks when your rainbow-colored energy bar is at full capacity; once empty, it’ll just regenerate over time.

Mechanically, one of the biggest changes to the Breakout formula is the fact that you can move the platform up and down (to a certain height) in addition to the usual horizontal motion. This allows you to fling the ball as hard as you want as it drops back down, and levels can quickly resemble a hectic game of pinball as you try to catch the fast-moving critters bouncing off at every angle.

Source: Wikipedia

The Atari 2600 version of Breakout

Instead of losing lives when the ball drops to the bottom of the screen, you lose health points (the green bar in the gallery below). If your critters’ health reaches zero, you’ll immediately fail the level; you can choose to wait for their health to slowly refill over time, or you can buy things to feed them with. This is all done in the Tree, a place where you can check on the status of your animals, browse the in-game shop, and spend the coins you collected from completing the stages. Cheaper food will heal a lower amount of health points than the more expensive options, and you’ll need a total of 1,000 points to refill the bar completely.

You can also buy a variety of power-ups, like the Anti-Gravity ability that helps keep the ball in the air, as well as furniture to decorate the Tree. If earning coins is too slow for you, you can purchase optional coin packs that start from $0.99.

Keeping things fresh

Super Bunny Breakout will have 48 levels at launch — with plans to add more via updates and in-app purchases — organized into different sections like Lab 1 and Lab 2, each with its own distinct themes. Some of the levels I played operated like a factory, with conveyor belts transporting caged animals across the screen, while others contained beakers and pots filled with chemicals that slowed my platform’s movement with viscous goo. Even if you manage to never drop the ball, the environmental dangers can strip away your health if you don’t avoid them in time.

A few levels act as bonus missions and tweak the Breakout gameplay in different ways. The one I saw played like a billiards table, where you had to knock the colored rings into the designated “pockets.” You can’t lose health while playing them, and they’re useful for trying to collect any extra coins.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Here’s a radical idea: Let’s play games with real buttons and not that nebulous touch screen stuff. For most apps, touch controls work just fine, but as mobile games get bigger and more complex, it’s time to bust out the big sticks.

This is what mobile game developer Gameloft had in mind when it partnered with iOS apps and accessories maker Discovery Bay Games for the Duo Gamer, a Bluetooth-enabled, battery-powered controller that works exclusively with Gameloft apps. It’s now available for $79.99 and works with the iPad (all), the iPhone (3GS, 4, 4S, 5), and the iPod Touch (4th and 5th gen).

“We recognized that the iPad needed a console-style gaming controller and began development on the Duo Gamer,” said Mike Sievert, CEO of Discovery Bay Games, in an interview with GamesBeat. “With development underway, we started looking for the best launch partner and Gameloft was our first choice. Their top-rated apps feature rich, immersive 3D graphics and the deep storylines that gamers have come to expect.”

I had a few minutes to play with the controller last month at Gameloft’s headquarters in San Francisco. The first thing I noticed was how responsive the Duo Gamer felt: The two analog sticks were as solid and smooth as those I’m used to playing with on a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 controller. It has a nice weight to it as well, even though it doesn’t have any sort of force feedback or rumble built-in.

It’s clear that the best way to enjoy the Duo Gamer is to sit back on a couch with the games projected on a TV, though the box does include a stand to hold your iPad. I was playing N.O.V.A 3, the latest in Gameloft’s science fiction-themed first-person shooter series, this way via an iPad that was using Apple’s Digital AV Adapter and a HDMI cable. The two trigger buttons — the left for aiming, the right for shooting — felt snappy as I blasted aliens away with my shotgun (in part due to the game’s really generous aim assist). According to Sievert, two AA batteries should last up to 24 hours of continuous usage.

It helps if you’re a huge Gameloft fan

At almost $80 each, the Duo Gamer isn’t exactly an impulse buy. As prolific as Gameloft is when it comes to making iOS games, the controller will only work with five titles at launch: N.O.V.A 3, Brothers in Arms 2: Global Front, Asphalt 7: Heat, Modern Combat 3: Fallen Nation, and Order & Chaos Online. At least five more games, still unannounced, will be compatible in the next couple of months. Beyond that, however, it seems that future support will depend on the Duo Gamer’s success.

“[What we're hoping for are] people who are that hardcore into Modern Combat and N.O.V.A,” said Thomas Price, product PR manager for Gameloft. “They’re hopefully people who just play multiplayer all the time. They’re going to want to get one of these because it’s worth it to them and because they have all these games and they play them all.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Revenge has to start small. You can’t just decapitate people out of the blue, after all. So to prepare us would-be supernatural assassins, publisher Bethesda released Dishonored: Rat Assassin for iOS devices, a free spin-off of Arkane Studio’s upcoming first-person action game.

Developed by Quantum Squid, Rat Assassin will feel familiar if you’ve ever played Fruit Ninja or the myriad of other slice-and-dice titles on the App Store; except instead of slicing food, you’re cutting up rats. Those vile rodents are responsible for the deadly plague that’s spreading throughout the city of Dunwall, the primary setting in Dishonored’s bleak-looking world.

And for a free mobile game, it’s surprisingly deep.

The better you can pull off your combos — basically killing as many rats as you can in one continuous swipe — the better the equipment you receive. In addition to upgrading your blades with different powers, you can unlock new “walls” (like the map above), a new enemy (the dreaded Hagfish), and special objects like Whale Bone charms (giving you the Shadow Skill ability that can turn rats into ash). You can also trigger Bend Time, which slows the action down to a crawl if the rats are overwhelming you on screen.

Everything in Rat Assassin’s arsenal of powers are just a sample of the different kinds of abilities you’ll have in Dishonored, which comes out October 9 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

Dishonored Rat Assassin is available now as a free download for the iPhone (3GS, 4, 4S) and the fourth generation iPod touch. Bethesda mentioned on its blog that an iPad version will also be coming in the “near future.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The graphical gulf between console and mobile games continues to close in, especially now that Gameloft is ready to reveal its first mobile title running on Unreal Engine 3, Wild Blood.

Coming soon for both iOS and Android devices, Wild Blood is a third-person action game much in the vein of Sony Santa Monica’s God of War franchise. Except instead of destroying the pantheon of Greek mythology, you must save the denizens of King Arthur’s kingdom from a horde of demons. And part of the reason why hellspawn are roaming around Albion is because of you: You play as Lancelot, who’s affair with Queen Guinevere made King Arthur mad for vengeance, causing him to partner with the evil sorceress Morgana to exact his vengeance on you.

Moral of the story: Next time, maybe you should think twice before sleeping with your king’s wife.

As one of the knights of the fabled Round Table, Lancelot naturally comes with a bevy of weapons and special abilities. Though you’ll start out with just one giant sword, your arsenal increases as you earn experience points; in the demo (shown on an iPad 3), a leveled up Lancelot dual-wields a pair of magical axes and shoots enemies from afar with his bow.

Combat leans toward a simple combo system that feels very responsive and smooth as Lancelot dodges and rolles his way through a large group (around a dozen or so) of demons. In a matter of seconds, these creatures became nothing more than a fine bloody mist.

Featuring a lengthy single-player campaign and a player-versus-player arena, Gameloft clearly wants its first Unreal Engine game to epic.

Epic Game’s Unreal Engine 3 — usually known for its impressive level of graphic fidelity on consoles and PCs – has seen widespread adoption among many developers since its debut for mobile devices in 2010. The incredible success of Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade, the first iOS game to run on UE3, contributed to the engine’s popularity.

Gameloft is one of the more prolific publishers of mobile and tablet games. Previous marquee titles from this year includes The Dark Knight Rises, a visually impressive but flawed video game adaptation of the Christopher Nolan film. In early 2011, the company revealed that its first UE3 game would be a first-person shooter known as March of Heroes; however, this was later cancelled.

When Gameloft reported its second quarter earnings in July, the mobile company showed signs of positive growth, expecting to close out 2012 with sales totaling over $240 million.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The world was a very different place when Pitfall Harry first swung onto the Atari 2600 in 1982. Video game consoles were still in their infancy, let alone handheld electronics, and the Internet was at least a decade away from entering people’s homes.

Almost 30 years later, Activision Publishing is staging a comeback for its genre-defining adventure game on iOS and Android devices. Developed by its newly-minted mobile studio, The Blast Furnace, the reimagined Pitfall! once again puts Harry’s fate into your hands — this time in the form of an endless running game.

“The vision was to take inspiration from the ’82 Pitfall and all of its cool gameplay [elements],” said Greg Canessa, vice president of Activision Mobile, to GamesBeat. “We took that inspiration and iconography and [brought them] to 2012 with modern technology while trying to stay true to that game.”

The rope swings, crocodiles, gold bars, and other familiar objects from the original Pitfall! all make an appearance in this reimagined universe. The press release promises “an ever-changing landscape with different environments and shifting camera perspectives” where you can level up by earning experience points, power-ups, and tons of loot.

“It feels like a very out of control experience,” said Gordon Hall, the studio head of The Blast Furnace. “It feels very comfortable as you play it…[and] you can just kind of zone out. The team spent a lot of time honing the experience until they felt that ‘click’ until the game became addictive.”

Pitfall! is just one of the first initiatives for the U.K.-based development studio. Hall hinted that more reboots of Activision’s older titles could be coming down the pipeline as well.

“We desperately want to go through that back catalogue,” said Hall. “But at the same time, we have some very bright brains in the whole group from the top down…to create new and original IP [intellectual property].”

Pitfall! is now available in the Apple App Store. An Android version is also in the works.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The greatest foe the Batman ever fought against isn’t Ra’s al Ghul, Hush, or even the Joker. No, the most challenging criminal in the Caped Crusader’s rogue gallery exists outside of his control, and it’s only known by one name: bad movie licensed games (BMLG). Unfortunately, BMLG are back in Gotham, wreaking havoc with this year’s release of The Dark Knight Rises (TDKR) on mobile devices.

The Gameloft-developed TDKR is the only game on the market based on this summer’s blockbuster film of the same name, the last of director Christopher Nolan’s critically and commercially lauded Batman trilogy. It’s a shame it didn’t turn out so well, since Bruce Wayne’s alter ego is enjoying a positive resurgence in video games thanks to 2009′s Batman: Arkham Asylum and last year’s Batman: Arkham City, both of which British developer Rocksteady Studios made.

Let’s put our detective caps on and figure out what went wrong.

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Impressive presentation for a mobile game
From the rain drops beating down on Batman’s suit to the impressive lighting and draw distance of Gotham City, TDKR is a good-looking mobile game. So good that to the untrained eye, it might even look like something that belongs on a PlayStation 2. Textures look sharp and detailed, especially in the environment, where you’ll never come across the same building twice.

Batman himself is chock-full of graphical nuance, and every single piece of his suit appears painstakingly rendered with the utmost care. The menu design is surprisingly slick, as well, with a clean and stylish interface for the game’s “Tech Shop,” a hub for displaying all the upgrade options at your disposal.

Sound design
Gameloft doesn’t borrow nearly enough from Hans Zimmer’s superb soundtrack for the movie, but the music that’s there does an adequate job of making you feel like you’re playing as Nolan’s Batman, rather than a mere caricature of him. Echoes of the film’s major themes are heard in the game’s various tracks, and they appropriately crescendo during the more dramatic moments.

None of the actors from the film reprise their roles here, but the sound-alikes the developers hired are not a bad substitute. In particular, voice actor Sean Schemmel accurately pulls off Batman’s hoarse, guttural vocals from the movie (which stars Christian Bale in this role).

WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE

Boring and repetitive combat
Combat is the crux of TDKR’s experience, as almost anything you do in the game involves punching or kicking someone. You have four buttons to tap on — one for the actual physical combat, one for your gadgets, one for jumping and dodging, and one for countering — but you can get through the game perfectly fine if you mash on the first one.

However, a severe lack of variation in Batman’s move set is the real problem here, even when taking the counter moves into consideration (the counter button only appears when someone is trying to whack you from behind). Within my first hour or two of play, I saw the same right-hook-left-hook-spin-kick-slow-motion-uppercut combo more times than I cared to count. Sometimes the Dark Knight decides to add a swift knee or elbow to the face and maybe even pick up an enemy to toss him to the ground, but this does little to alleviate the mind-numbing formula.

It’s so frustratingly boring that I spent most of my credits (earned only when defeating criminals) buying and upgrading the Batarangs — small shuriken-like weapons in Batman’s arsenal — just to avoid the hand-to-hand fighting altogether. Don’t even bother using the other gadgets: Except for specific circumstances, they’re too ineffective in combat.

Defusing bombs for the hundredth time
The challenge for any studio creating an open-world game like TDKR is making sure that mission designs are constantly fresh and interesting to encourage the player to explore the environment. Gameloft is unable to overcome this obstacle, as the game clumsily succumbs to the stereotypical pitfalls associated with the genre. You’ll play through the same handful of mission archetypes over and over again.

Whether you’re following the story or the side missions, you’ll likely grow tired of saving hostages, defusing bombs, and hacking electrical equipment. When these issues were paired with the repetitive combat, I couldn’t stand playing the game for more than an hour at a time.

Not even Lucius Fox can fix all the glitches in this game
Part of the reason movie-licensed games are often horrible is because of an extremely limited amount of development time, often being less than a year. After all, no studio intentionally sets out to make a bad game.

TDKR, however, feels like it’s not even finished. Sometimes it’ll quit to the iPhone’s home screen by itself; helicopters will quietly vanish after you set an EMP charge on them, rather than crash to the ground; the audio will cut out intermittently during mission dialogue; and enemies will magically walk on air when you fight them on rooftops. In one baffling instance, Batman kept freezing in place at the end of a mission, but everyone around him continued to move and talk like nothing happened. The only way I was able to circumvent this was to escape the bugged-out location by grappling to another building.

Abbreviated plot
If you care at all about how Nolan’s trilogy comes to an end, please watch the movie before playing the game. Some scenes and set pieces from the film are depicted in the right chronological order, but they’re cut short or artificially expanded on with boring gameplay objectives.

Specific lines of dialogue from the film are even repeated word for word, but they, too, lose their intensity and panache because of the altered scenes. The rest of the plot plays out like a bland and uninteresting CliffsNotes version of the film.

Freemium model in a paid game
Optional in-app purchases (IAP) are de rigeur for games in the App Store, so I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s included in TDKR. That doesn’t make it any less disgusting. The game costs $6.99 up front and is filled with IAPs — in the form of virtual items or in-game currency — at a wide range of prices. Apparently, someone out there is crazy enough to spend $99.99 for 150,000 in-game credits.

CONCLUSION

With a laborious combat system, sterile mission designs, and a weak retelling of the storyline crippling it, TDKR game is an entirely skippable experience. Only those with nerves of steel and an immense amount of patience will be able to slog through all eight hours of this Gameloft-crafted adventure. Otherwise, if you really need your Dark Knight fix, just watch the movies again. Or play any of Rocksteady’s Batman games.

Score: 45/100

The Dark Knight Rises was released on June 20, 2012 for both iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) and Android devices. The game was bought and reviewed on an iPhone 4S. 

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Casual games developer King.com announced that its free-to-play title, Bubble Witch Saga, is now available on the iTunes App Store. The bubble-popping puzzler is the first mobile game to offer full synchronization, including game progress and any purchased virtual goods, with its counterpart on Facebook, which currently has 4.6 million active players.

“As consumers and the industry focus more on games for mobile devices, launching a truly cross-platform Facebook game has been a top priority for King.com,” said Riccardo Zacconi, the chief executive of King.com, in the press release. “We’re excited to be the pioneers in making this available for our players. Gamers can play signed in or not and progress either way, enabling them to experience the excitement of Bubble Witch Saga whenever and wherever they wish, without losing their place in the game.”

In Bubble Witch Saga, you progress through levels by matching three or more of the same-colored bubbles, which then fall into cauldrons that net you bonus points. The game already contains more than 150 levels, with more being added every week.

“This type of fully synchronized functionality is going to be expected by gamers moving forward,” said Tommy Palm, the “mobile guru” at King.com, to GamesBeat when asked if this feature will be implemented in future releases. “Players do not want to have to start all over again…just because they switch devices. Therefore, we feel it’s critical to focus on cross-platform experiences for our casual social titles to come. Also, much of the functionality built for [Bubble Witch Saga] is reusable for coming games, which means we will be able to more easily ensure the quality of future mobile games much faster.”

Another casual games developer, Big Fish Games, is also focused on maintaining this type of progress across different devices (albeit not on Facebook). It released Big Fish Unlimited on Tuesday, a cloud-based streaming service that allows players to access a variety of casual titles from any device as long as a constant Internet connection is available. King.com, however, believes that native applications, at least for now, are still the way to go.

“Our current mobile strategy is to offer a high quality native-game experience for tablet and smart phones,” said Palm. “We feel that the game experience that consumers are looking for is best catered by fast [and] responsive native apps. In the future, mobile networks may be good enough to make great game experiences using streaming technology, but today they are just not there yet.”

Founded in 2003, the London-based King.com is the fourth-largest publisher on Facebook, with 2.5 billion matches played each month on the social-networking site alone. In addition to other popular titles from its Saga series, the Android version of Bubble Witch Saga will launch later this year.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Publisher Electronic Arts’ licensing agreement with Rock Band developer Harmonix will cease to exist as of next week. After July 31, the mobile versions of the popular rhythm-based music series, Rock Band and Rock Band Reloaded (not pictured), will no longer be sold in the iTunes App Store.

Warning notices are already in place on both games’ App Store descriptions, where they still retail for $4.99 each, along with a library of $0.99 song packs as in-app purchases. EA also explained details of this delisting on its website, where it urges customers to back up their games to iCloud before July 31 if they want to keep playing or restore previous purchases. If the games aren’t already stored in iCloud or downloaded to a local iOS device, players will be unable to recover their data once the deadline has passed.

Harmonix retains the intellectual property rights for its games (which also includes Dance Central) as part of an agreement with its former parent company, Viacom, who sold off the studio in 2010.

We’ve reached out to Harmonix for comment, but haven’t heard back as of this writing.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Last year, Apple tried to have a court case thrown out from a group of angry parents whose children were racking up large iTunes bills from in-app purchases. Now, a District judge in California is saying no to Apple’s request and letting the case stand in court, reports Paid Content.

The problem started with children downloading free apps and games, then using their parent’s iTunes accounts to purchase credits in the form of coins, prizes, or other cartoony currency. The apps were considered “bait apps” because, while free in the App Store, they often required in-app purchases to play the game. When parents began receiving bills as high as $338.72, they became upset because the apps were supposed to be free, Paid Content wrote.  Because of a fifteen-minute login window that used to exist, children didn’t need to ask their parents to approve the purchases. Apple has since removed the 15 minute window loophole.

A series of class-action lawsuits were brought against Apple and later combined into one lawsuit. Apple then fired back, asking for the case to be thrown out.

U.S. District Judge Edward Da Vila made a ruling on March 31, 2012 saying the parents who filed the class actions suits had suffered sufficient harm for the case to stand. The case didn’t grab attention until tech lawyer Venkat Balasubramani covered it on Eric Goldman’s Law Blog.

As it stands, Apple is expected to file its defense May 24. The company will rely on contract law to uphold its iTunes Terms of Service, which the company believes covers it in the case. However, there is a dispute about how the Terms of Service apply to minors, which may affect the outcome.

You can read the full court documents below.

Children playing with tablet image via Shutterstock

Houston, we don’t have a problem. Rovio’s latest Angry Birds game for iOS and Android, this one set in outer space, has received 10 million downloads in just three days, the company announced via its Twitter account Monday morning.

Angry Birds Space was launched this past Thursday amid a planet-wide marketing blitz and acts a sequel to Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio. The space-y successor features the Angry Birds gameplay users are used to, except this time you have to deal with different gravitational fields. NASA even helped to promote the game before launch with a real-life Angry Birds physics demo from the International Space Station.

In his Angry Birds Space review, lead GamesBeat writer Dean Takahashi notes that the “gameplay is at once familiar and also more fun, because the space setting allows for some interesting new zero-gravity physics effects. … In the game, there are lots of small planets and asteroids, each of which has a atmosphere-like circle around it that exerts a gravitational pull on the bird’s flight. If you aim a bird correctly, you can use the gravity to create a secondary slingshot effect that swings the bird, increasing its speed.”

The game made headlines on Friday when Rovio’s execs sent mixed messages about whether Angry Birds Space would land on Windows Phone. After the company’s CMO said the company had “no plans” to port the game to Windows Phone, Rovio CEO Mikael Hed corrected the record and said it actually would come to the platform eventually (there’s no launch date in mind yet).

Angry Birds Space costs 99 cents on iPhone, free (with ads) for Android phones, and $2.99 for HD version on iPad and Android.

Check out the Angry Birds Space promo video by Rovio below:

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The deal extends Angry Birds, which became a cultural phenomenon as the most downloaded mobile game in history with hundreds of millions of downloads, from the mobile realm to the emerging platform for apps on TVs. Samsung is one of many TV companies creating Internet-connected TVs that are capable of running apps, or programs developed to run on TV screens.

Smart TVs are just in their infancy, and apps may be the way to make them more popular. With the animation channel, Rovio is taking the game brand and extending it to animated shows and movies as well. Samsung made the announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. When Samsung officials showed an animated short of an Angry Bird character, it drew chuckles from the crowd of thousands of journalists.

For more gadget news, be sure to check out VentureBeat’s live coverage from CES 2012.

Photo by Sean Ludwig

I fondly remember playing Mega Man X for SNES when I was younger and loved the challenge and attention to detail. The game introduced you to Zero, Mega Man’s friend, who uses an energy sword instead of an arm cannon. But as much as I want to re-live the experience, angry complaints around the web and a terrible-looking trailer (see below) are not making me download this in a hurry.

Fans are angry for good reason. First off, the game functions less smoothly than the 1993 SNES version despite the fact that the iPhone is capable of incredible 3D graphics. The game makes you load portions of each map you play through, with jarring black-screen transitions. Those in-level loading times were never required on the SNES, so it’s inexcusable to include them on the iPhone version.

The other major offense of the iOS version of MMX is the ability to purchase upgrades like “all weapons” or “all health boosts” with real money instead of making the player unlock it by completing the game the proper way. Way to cheapen the experience even more, Capcom.

You can see the whole mess in a 7-minute trailer below:

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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