Guide to Mac, iPod, iPad and iPhone news and reviews
Apple’s fight to bring on-demand cable programming to Apple TV via Time Warner might have fallen apart in the wake of the media giant’s upcoming merger with Comcast, but now the Wall Street Journal reports that Apple’s in similar talks with Comcast its…
The Pokémon series includes some of the most popular releases for portable gaming systems of all time, but despite Nintendo’s continued reluctance to dabble in the smartphone market, we’ve yet to see a suitable clone come to iOS. With Monster Legacy, developer Outplay hopes to change all that. Its scrappy pet-battling game is so reminiscent of Nintendo’s original, in fact, that the main differences center around execution and setting than with gameplay.
Indeed, the broad strokes are the same. A young boy or girl serves as the hero, the whole business of capturing critters and making them fight remains, and monster evolution makes the cut as well. You even get to hunt for wild monsters in the grass, and a mage-like “Mentor” stands in for good ol’ Professor Oak. The differences emerge once you realize you’re not jaunting about the countryside competing for awards; you’re tasked with saving the world of Arborea from a grumpy chap called Ardur.
But the bigger differences spring from the payment mode. Monster Legacy is a free-to-play game, which means that opportunities to use premium gems for microtransactions pop up around almost every corner. You find them in the usual places, such as the boosts needed to speed up the construction of buildings on your ranch, but you also find them in more controversial spots, such as the 100{813a954d5e225a1509f22204ece89c855080ce25555f20805f61bed63cbfde3b} chance traps for catching monsters or for health potions and spells used in the thick of combat. A risky venture, yes, but I couldn’t see where it negatively affected my experience during the couple of hours I played.
It also helps that Monster Legacy captures the Pokémon experience quite well. Based on my time with the game, the battles are fast and filled with spells that require tapping the screen at a precise moment for maximum effectiveness, and the diverse assortment of creatures allows for fun battles even in the early levels. Arborea, though coated in a cutesy aesthetic that lightly recalls Facebook social games, is a lovely place to explore, and more than 70 quests await you in its wilds.
Monster Legacy, in short, is about as close to a true Pokémon game on iOS as we’re likely to get for a while, and thus it’s well worth a look when it launches for iPhone and iPad on Thursday, March 20.
Follow this article’s writer, Leif Johnson, on Twitter.
Several months after Samsung’s bungled entry into the world of smartwatches (and possibly months ahead of the appearance of Apple’s so-called “iWatch), Google has announced its “Android Wear” system. Android Wear is designed to bring Google’s mobile op…
A disappointing reception compared to the iPhone 5s has led many commentators to call the iPhone 5c a flop of sorts, but the colorful little device refuses to go away. Indeed, leaked documents from O2 Germany suggest that a new 8GB model is on the way to stores tomorrow, and Cult of Mac notes that two carriers in the U.K. have, in fact, already received shipments of the new models.
The leak was picked up by Caschy’s Blog of Germany, which obtained the O2 internal memo from a “trusted source.” According to the documents, we’ll see the smaller iPhone 5c no later than tomorrow, March 18. The new unit is said to cost €509 ($709), representing a €60 ($84) reduction in price over the existing 16GB model.
Source: Engadget
Other evidence seems to confirm the findings as fact, including a photo of the 8GB iPhone’s 5c’s packaging over at Engadget. The photo shows that the unit’s part number is MG902B/A, which puts it in the same A1507 class of models as the 16GB and 32GB versions.
Little else about the new phone is known, although it’s expected to include many of the same features as the existing models, such as the 8-megapixel camera, the A6 processor, and the 4-inch Retina display. Even so, it’ll be interesting to see what Apple does with this release if the rumors are legit. A mere 8GB isn’t much of anything these days, especially considering that Apple’s own updates require about 3GB of storage space, to say nothing about software from secondary parties.
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Windows 7 remains one of the most popular operating systems for Apple’s rival Microsoft, but apparently the folks in Cupertino want nothing to do with it. According to new support documents (via MacRumors), Apple’s Boot Camp for the new Mac Pro no long…
Here we find that most elusive of creatures: a 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) strategy game for iOS that’s not compromised by a free-to-play model. Autumn Dynasty Warlords scores a victory on that front alone. This tale of martial ambition in ancient China may have a harder time conquering on some other fronts, but its simple strengths usually suffice to rout its flaws.
It’s essentially Shogun: Total War Lite, delivering a compact take on that PC favorite. Warlords is designed for conquests on 10-minute subway rides, and thus it lacks the depth of, say, Sid Meier’s Civilization – though what’s here does the trick. Diplomatic missions exist, for instance, but they involve little more than clicking on an officer and sending him to chat or trade with rivals. City building, that old mobile strategy standby, also guest stars here to let you train new units and generate resources, but space limits keep it from detracting from Warlords’ focus on bite-sized schemes. Each element yields enough complexity that the tutorial pop-ups never sufficiently explain Warlords’ nuances, but the gameplay’s straightforward enough that you should pick them up on your own.
All of this is secondary to the dirty business of war and the multiple battles it takes to conquer a province. There’s beauty here that gives new meaning to the “art of war,” both in the attractive aesthetic inspired by early Chinese watercolors and in the sweeping brushstrokes that trail your fingers as you direct troop movements through terrain. Pity, then, that it sometimes fades in battle. Troops tend to work as intended, but strategy falls flat as soldiers automatically attack when they’re near enemies (and bugged foes may not fight at all), and the limited troop selections for both sides sometimes turn warfare into barefaced games of rock-paper-scissors.
Other aspects threaten to spoil the fun, such as the absence of a multiplayer mode and the ever-present time limits for battles. Master Autumn Dynasty Warlords’ quirks and start to expand your empire, however, and you’ll discover a rewarding mobile strategy experience that currently has few peers.
The bottom line. Autumn Dynasty Warlords does a great job of translating 4X strategy for mobile play, although its simplicity threatens the appeal of its combat.
It may seem hard to believe for those of us who stay on top of the world’s newest technological advances, but there are huge swaths of the world that still have limited access to the Internet. As the Daily Mail reports (via AppleInsider), the non-profi…
Samsung’s on the verge of releasing its newest smartphone, and Apple aficionados might find that some of its rumored features sound a little familiar. As SamMobile reports (via 9to5Mac), the Galaxy S5 (if that’s not similar enough for you) will embed a fingerprint sensor in the device’s home button, much as with the iPhone 5s. That’s a stark departure from earlier rumors that the sensor would be embedded in the screen itself.
Samsung will likely announce the device at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next Monday, but the rival smartphone probably won’t go on sale until sometime in March or April. 9to5Mac also claims that the new phone won’t have the iris sensor that was widely rumored, based on a document obtained from KGI Research that points to the fingerprint sensor instead.
Source: 9to5Mac
In SamMobile’s words, “Samsung hasn’t opted for on-screen buttons and is still using physical buttons, like it has been using in the past on all of its flagship devices. The sensor itself works in a swipe manner, which means that you would need to swipe the entire pad of your finger, from base to tip, across the home key to register your fingerprint properly.”
Not bad, but swiping seems a little more fiddly than Apple’s comparatively simple solution that works with a simple touch. We’ll find out what other surprises the device has in store when Samsung reveals it on February 24.
Follow this article’s writer, Leif Johnson, on Twitter.
Maintaining the privacy of users has always been a major concern at Apple, to the point that it’s apparently affecting the success of the Cupertino giant’s iAd business, reports AdAge. Ad buyers say Apple is “downright stingy” with its customer informa…
The story goes that Apple originally intended for iTunes to be a “break-even” business, but the popular music and video service has proven more successful than those earliest projections could have dreamed of. Indeed, based on Asymco’s calculations (vi…
Many of the most popular speculative concepts for Apple’s new iPhone have depicted a unit without bezels (most notably in the work of Martin Hajek, seen below), but now news is surfacing from The Korea Herald (via Cult of Mac) that this is what we’ll be seeing in the new release, after all.
Citing unnamed “industry sources” (but of course), The Korea Herald states that the absence of bezels will allow the screen to stretch all the way across the face of the phone, and the unit would once again include a fingerprint scanner as well.
Source: Martin Hajek
Perhaps not surprisingly, The Korea Herald claims that Samsung also plans to deliver a bezel-less Galaxy 5 for its next release, which will include its own take on the fingerprint scanner we see on the iPhone 5s. The report gives no insight into how Apple might change the face of the phone in order to accommodate the larger screen and the scanner.
9to5Mac was pretty quick to “debunk” the rumor earlier today considering the site’s own enthusiastic rumor dropping as of late, and it suggested not taking much stock in the reports. “Clearly the company is toying with several ideas,” 9to5Mac said, “but today’s reports don’t hold much weight in terms of determining what we’ll likely see in the next generation device eight months from now.”
Follow this article’s writer, Leif Johnson, on Twitter.
If you shop at Whole Foods Market, you might want to get used to seeing products by your favorite Cupertino computer company at the stands. No, Apple isn’t selling devices at the popular grocery chain; it’s partnering with Square to start offering its …
The rumors popping up over the past few months have increasingly made the so-called “iWatch” sound like the wonder product many of us have been waiting for from Cupertino for years, but a new report from Networkworld (via MobiHealthNews) suggests that …
The news over the last year has been stuffed with tales of stolen iDevices and the measures used to present those thefts, but it’s been woefully silent on whether such techniques actually work. But they do, as Stuff.co.nz reports (via Cult of Mac), and they do it well. Using Apple’s Find My iPad feature, father and son duo Chris and Markham Phillips of New Zealand were able to hunt down the thief who took their iPad and even retrieve it.
The trouble started in Nelson, New Zealand, when the pair returned from a restaurant only to find that someone had gone through their car and run off with cash, glasses, and their iPad. But they quickly remembered Apple’s security feature. “As despair and disgust begin to kick in, we remember a newly installed tracking application on both the stolen iPad and the retained iPhone,” Markham–the son–told Stuff.co.nz. “We fire up the app [and] the iPad icon pings onto the map.”
Source: Cult of Mac
The chase led them to a nearby suburb, and they called the police as they headed over there themselves. The house they arrived at was filled with “suspicious, sunglass-wearing scoundrels,” one of whom even used a BMW as a getaway car, and by then the device had been turned off and was no longer registering on Find My iPhone. (This all sounds so different from such crimes in the States.)
That didn’t deter them. They sent a message saying, “It’s a small town. We’ve seen you, your car, and your friends. Drop the bag and iPad at Countdown by the Warehouse by 5pm tomorrow and we’ll leave the cops out of it.” And surprise, surprise, they got it back. Unfortunately for the alleged crook, the phone call to the cops earlier caught up with him and he’s now in custody anyway.
Cult of Mac notes that the Find My iPhone/iPad features been used in far more high profile incidents than this. Just last month, for instance, it played a key role in the arrest of two suspects from Detroit in relation to the murder of a University of Michigan medical student.
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One of today’s big surprises is the sudden appearance of what appears to be leaked screenshots from the long-anticipated “iOS in the Car” taken by app developer Steven Troughton-Smith. As MacRumors reports, it’s possible that Troughton-Smith managed to…
Blizzard Entertainment, the juggernaut studio behind such well-known games as World of Warcraft and Diablo IIII, just announced a surprise that should make a lot of game enthusiasts happy. Hearthstone, Blizzard’s online collectible card game that’s gen…