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iOS Brings Exploding Kittens to Your Phone

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"Snapsot of the Exploding Kittens game"

The Exploding Kittens game broke a couple of records since its release.

STATES CHRONICLE – After the card game had an incredible amount of success, iOS brings Exploding Kittens to your phone. The roaring success of the game was attributed to its likeliness to now famous Cards against Humanity, a game which brings out the worst in people.

iOS brings Exploding Kittens to your phone after the incredible success that the card game had on Kickstarter, being one of the most funded projects that ever emerged from the platform. It seems that the game is breaking record after record being the most funded game, the game with the most individual received funds (219,000 people contributed with almost $8.8 million) and now, at only a day after it was released, the game managed to reach number 1 in the Paid App top.

While Cards against Humanity, with which Exploding Kittens were associated, manages to bring out the worse in people and make them build friendships after realizing the lack of humanity in their peers, Exploding Kitten does the exact same opposite. The Russian Roulette of card games helps you ruin your friendships more than Uno or Monopoly ever managed to.

The basic principle of the game is that the players pull cards one by one until they find an exploding kitten. But things get more complicated because you can defuse the furry danger with sandwiches made out of catnip or belly rubs, and you can also sabotage other players and send an exploding kitten to them.

iOS brings Exploding Kittens to your phone with little changes in the original card game. The developers, Shane Small and Elan Lee partnered with Substantial studio in order to transform the game into a full-functioning app. In order to make the App more appealing for all players, they modified the game a little.

According to Small and Lee, the Exploding Kittens App features some new mechanics, new art, voices and sounds. Also new cards have been added while some were removed. But all in all, the game is still as fun to play on your phone as it is when you play it in the card form with your friends.

What is more remarkable when it comes to the App’s overall success is that the digital version, which costs only $1.99, can only be played with other people that are in the same rooms as yourself. This is due to a combination between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology.

While iOS brings Exploding Kittens to your phone, Android and Blackberry aren’t far away with the development, either.

If you’re not yet convinced of the game’s potential, you can check out how to play Exploding Kittens in the video below.

Image source: http://www.explodingkittens.com/

Zynga’s Words with Friends is Back and Better

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If you’re a gamer, then you should definitely check out these latest PS4 games that are coming your way in October. But if those kind of games aren’t your cup of tea and you’re more into chill games to play with your friends, then this news will surely bring you joy: it appears that Zynga is bringing back Words with Friends, one of their most famous and successful online games.

Words with Friends

Zynga  has recently rebooted their most popular game, Farmville and now they’ve announced that they are planning to do the same with their Words with Friends game. The original application launched in 2009 and became one of the most popular games in the Apple App Store.

Jonathan Knight, Zynga VP of Games, has states that they were planning to create a player-centric approach and that

We want more ways to play. They want the game to match their lifestyle. Mobile habits are changing. People want to play on their own schedule at any time.

Naturally, the most requested feature of Words with Friends is Solo Play and it’s finally coming without the need for an internet connection!

Words with Friends

New features of the game Words with Friends include Community Matches, where you can create more personalized contests and you can play your ideal opponent. Other features include a brand new and improved Dictionary and Word of the Day that will help its users improve their vocabulary so that they can become better at the game. All the players are going to be able to access personal profile that will provide them with game statistics such as unique words plays and wins and losses.

Are you a fan of Words with Friends? Are you happy the game’s coming back? Drop us a line in the comment section below and tell us your thoughts on this matter.

Lego Fusion Lets Kids Build Their World With Real Bricks

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lego fusion gameIf you are that type of parent concerned with how kids choose to spend their free time and set to not let them get lost in the virtual world, we have some good news for you.

Remember Lego? The game that kept busy and happy millions of children worldwide? Now Lego is giving something new to the modern society and tries to pull off children out of their mind – numbing tablet, phone and even PC games.

Enter Lego Fusion, a game that lets people build a virtual playground with the help of real – life bricks. How is this possible? Let’s listen to tech experts who gave the game a ride:

This is the new Lego Fusion, three new sets designed to let you build Lego worlds inside your tablet or phone by using physical bricks in the real world. Build something, capture it, and it becomes a 3D object inside a virtual universe. And then you can play with it just like in a Lego Star Wars game. They are super-fun.

Super – fun they are indeed, but what is even more awesome is that the Lego Fusion game allows children to meet with other children (who also use their Fusion sets) and compete against each other or just have fun together:

each Lego Fusion box comes with 200 Lego pieces, which you can use to build in play in virtual games like “Town Master,” where you have to build a town, “Resort Designer,” a racing game called “Create and Race,” and a game where you have to defend your tower called “Battle Towers.” You can upload all of your physical Lego creations to become part of the game, but each creation joins the larger Lego community where others similarly upload their Fusion sets. This means you can race cars and battle towers with real players and their unique creations, or even let your townspeople visit other players’ towns.

For more conservative parents, this game might not be what they dreamed of in terms of child’s play. It is still an indoor game that still uses tech devices instead of real plastic Lego bricks spread all over the floor or footballs or bicycles or whatever they played with back in their day.

Still, if you can’t take the child out of the computer, you can at least gather a group of children in the same virtual playground and let them interact, socialize, build relationships and develop a sense of group belonging. From a tech point of view, the Lego Fusion is a spectacular product that brings together tech and play and we have a feeling it will appeal a lot to adults too.

Starting this August you will be able to purchase the Town Master, Create & Race and Battle Towers boxes and the Resort Designer in September. All the physical boxes will be available at a price of $35. The added perk to this deal is that the Lego app, for both iOS and Android is free.

Nintendo Games and Future Plans E3 Roundup

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nintendo games The E3 event is the place to find out and see for yourself all the goodies the tech giants have in their sleeves for us.

Today we will take a look over Nintendo, as the company managed to surprise a lot of people with a lot of interesting news. Let’s take a look over the upcoming Nintendo games and future plans to hooks us to the Wii U console forever.

First things first, have you seen the new Zelda trailer? The company showed off an amazing new Zelda game snippet to make everybody drool at the sight of the vivid, powerful 3D imagery.

The new installment of the popular (and may we say) legendary Zelda will not become available before 2015, but if you take a sneak – peak at the teaser trailer, you will realize the wait is worthy. Immersing in a gorgeous world and fighting enemies is something Zelda fans will fall in love with at first sight.

Moving on, let’s talk about the Amiibo toys Nintendo showcased during the E3 event. Following the footsteps of its predecessors, Activision and Disney, respectively, Nintendo decided to test the waters of the “toy – to – life” concept and, brace yourselves, take it to the next level of awesomeness.

The Amiibo toys are Nintendo action figures that you can “warp” into all Nintendo games and have fun with. We are talking about Mario, Link, Pikachu, Donkey Kong and Metroid’s Samus Aran, to name just a few among the ten interactive toys Nintendo aims to deliver into the world. They work simple and fast: once placed on the Wii U console gamepad, the toys are transported into the game and from that point on, imagination is the limit.

When are we going to see the new Nintendo games featuring the Amiibo toys? Well, the first one to sport these famous Nintendo characters is going to be Super Smash Bros, expected to hit the shelves very soon. While some of these mascots will have their own games at some point, the first step is to feature them in the existing and future Nintendo games. Let’s see what we should expect this year:

This holiday brings a different take on Zelda in the action-heavy button-masher Hyrule Warriors along with a new pair of 3DS Pokemon games, Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, the first starring gig for Mario’s mushroomy sidekick, is another 2014 release. And fans of wild, over-the-top action will be anxious to get their mitts on Bayonetta 2 this October, which pulls a twofer by packing the original Bayonetta game on the same disc.

And Nintendo has big plans for 2015 as well, so all you Nintendo games fans, keep your patience at high levels, as you will have plenty of goodies to enjoy in the immediate future!

The Surgeon Simulator Game Will Be Available for PS 4 Soon

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surgeon simulator game If you are a med student getting ready to embrace the rewarding job of a surgeon, you can now practice and improve your surgical skills with the help of your PS 4 and the Surgeon Simulator game created by Bossa Studios.

If you are familiar with the game or saw some vloggers play it while explaining its features, then you know the highlight of this game is not its educational edge, but its level of difficulty.

Simpler put, the first version of the game is so hard to play, all you achieve is killing the patient and have the organs flow around havoc. Which, as sick as it sounds, is funny and makes for the ultimate goal of the game.

So if you really want to test your surgical skills, find another simulator. This one is only for the dark – humorous players with a thing for murder. We’re sorry.

The original version of the Surgeon Simulator game was released for PC. With the help of your mouse you could try to become the next Grey’s Anatomy superstar surgeon. However, you almost never could save the patient’s life, as controlling the arms of the surgeon with the mouse was downright impossible. All you managed to achieve was flesh, blood, bones and internal organs to be chopped off, Dexter – style, and splashed all over your screen. The game was heavily mocked back in the day, but attention, it got.

Against all logic, the creators of the game released an iPad version earlier this year and now they are taking man slaughter to the next level: they will make a version for the PS 4.

Now imagine how terrible it will be. If you can’t control the surgeon’s moves with a PC mouse, you won’t ever be able to control the operation with the DualShock4 controller. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for the game’s creators, as they found a solution to this almost unsolvable dilemma. In the words of Bossa Studio representatives who talked to tech journalists,

a player can now control the surgeon’s arms by waving the DualShock4 controller in the air rather than only moving a mouse or pressing buttons on a controller.

Isn’t this just peachy? Now players will make even more surgical mistakes, leading to a bloody frenzy on the screen that seems to deeply please the game’s testers. So if you have a bad day, you had a terrible controversy with the boss, the wife or the Universe and you want to blow some steam, all you have to do is sit comfortably on your couch and perform a surgery.

Apparently, it is very satisfying to have all those gory details flowing on the screen. Bossa Studios consider that the PS 4 version of the Surgeon Simulator game will be even more successful than the PC version, which only makes you wonder how much of a psychopath today’s world has become. Joke aside, the game creators surely seem to manage to deliver an interesting and out – of – the – box product that appeals to a special type of humor. Chances are, it will indeed rock the gaming world.

Brace Yourselves, the New Mortal Kombat X Is Coming in 2015!

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mortal kombat x“The name of the game is Mortal Kombat X” tweeted yesterday the Mortal Kombat series creator Ed Boon and the world jumped at the news with an enthusiasm equaled only by the enthusiasm people received the 2011 installment of the game with.

Since yesterday, the news, rumors and leaks literally exploded everywhere, but up to this moment, we have a clear view on things.

Yesterday reporters didn’t know much about the upcoming new Mortal Kombat X, as the platforms to run it were yet undisclosed.

However, a few leaked Amazon product pages (which don’t exist anymore) showed that the game was made available for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PC.

The trailer released was also a reason for enthusiasm, and Warner Bross. had nothing else to do than confirm the rumors and give a few extra details, for your pleasure only. According to the Games Spot,

It will be on display next week at E3 2014. Warner Bros. says Mortal Kombat X will deliver a “cinematic” presentation combined with “all-new gameplay” to offer up the “most brutal Kombat experience ever.” It’s also going to have a significant online component. Warner Bros. says it will deliver a “fully connected experience” where players are launched into a “persistent online contest where every fighter matters in a global battle for supremacy.”

Fans of the Mortal Kombat series will also be pleased to find out that the new Mortal Kombat X will include an original story that will help showcase, build and develop the characters of the beloved Scorpion and Sub-Zero, among others. Also, for the first time in history, the new Mortal Kombat installment will allow players to choose from multiple character variations and these variations are said to change the ways the characters move, apply strategies and fight.

This is great news for all the gamers out there who stood behind the franchise even during its rough patch in the last years and it might be a good news for Microsoft too, as it tries to boost sales on its XBox One. Surely you remember the last news involving Microsoft’s decision to sell the XBox One without the Kinect. Now it would be interesting to find out how useful or useless the Kinect feature would be in this game’s particular case. We guess we will find out soon enough, as the E3 2014 conference will take place in Los Angeles next week.

Until then, keep your eyes peeled on the trailer and the future leaks and rumors, as people involved in the creation of the new Mortal Kombat X seem to love to tease the audience.

Watch Dogs Came Out With a Bang and a Myriad of Problems for AMD Users

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watch dogs system requirementsIf you are an avid gamer, you probably waited for Watch Dogs to show up with more enthusiasm than Apple fans wait for the next Apple gadget. Unfortunately, Watch Dogs came out with a bang and so many problems, people don’t know if to rejoice or throw their PC’s out the window.

The game was launched yesterday and it already received outstanding ovations from the critics. A curious mind also searched the torrents sites and found the game cracked and pirated a few hours after its release, something that shows that the world was more than ready to welcome the hacking hero into their lives.

But, just as the guys from Segment Next say, the game

[quote]Watch Dogs may become critics’ darling considering the raving reviews, but it will remain a painful experience for PC Gamers, who wish to experience it the best way possible on their high-end machines.[/quote]

Why is that? Well, briefly put, the game crashes, stops, freezes, displays errors and constant FPS droppings, gives you a black screen, a blue screen or a death error, loads in a lifetime or doesn’t load at all, has broken audio and video and the list can go on like this forever. The problem is not that the game has birth defects, but that your PC needs a lot of fixes and upgrades. If you use nVidia products, you have all chances to actually play Watch Dogs at a decent or high level of satisfaction. If you fall into the category of “AMD users”, the bad news are yet to come: you will probably never get to play the game at full performance, if at all.

The awful disappointment comes from tech analysts and reviewers:

Performance in Watch Dogs on AMD systems is something that AMD can’t fix with a patch, something that Joel Hruska from ExtremeTech talked about last year, where he said: AMD is no longer in control of its own performance. While GameWorks doesn’t technically lock vendors into NVIDIA solutions, a developer that wanted to support both companies equally would have to work with AMD and NVIDIA from the beginning of the development cycle to create a vendor-specific code path. It’s impossible for AMD to provide a quick after-launch fix. This kind of maneuver ultimately hurts developers in the guise of helping them.

For a better gaming experience, you can turn to your Play Station 4, XBox One or other previous console model you might have, as the game is said to be working on them optimally. However, if the Windows – powered PC is all you have, switching from AMD to nVidia might be a good idea too. Now that Watch Dogs came out with a bang, it would be a pity to deny yourself the experience of playing one of the most interesting games ever developed, just because your PC is technologically impaired.

Weed Firm Went Out the App Store With a Bang!

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weed firm Are you familiar with Weed Firm? This is an iOS game that was described as being similar to Grand Theft Auto meets Breaking Bad and for good reason.

Practically the game allows users to grow a marijuana based – empire, sell the pot, smoke it, make profits, meet gangsters and resist the competition in the drug – dealing market.

Does this sound illegal or immoral to you? It sounded to Apple, which decided to expel the game out of its App Store, to the dismay and rage of the game’s creators.

By now we guess that most iOS fans learned that the Weed Firm went out the App Store with a bang, and what bang that was! It is a unique moment in one’s life to read black on white an angry note dedicated to Apple. A note that does not only accuse the tech giant of hypocrisy and censorship, but which speaks the mind of a lot of people who don’t believe that playing a pot – based game means they will become drug dealers and gangsters. But before giving you the quintessence of the anti – Apple speech released by the game creators, let’s see what was really the problem.

Weed Firm was a successful game. So successful, in fact, that it scored the first place in the U.S. free app category and held this position for two days in a row. The game was reviewed by an average number of 5,000 people, receiving 4.5 out of 5 stars. It was grand, it was Walter White’s legacy, it was the American dream. And then, it disappeared from the App Store. Why?

The guys from TechCrunch say it like it is:

It’s clear why Apple wouldn’t want a game like this at the top of its App Store charts, but its rejection is also somewhat confusing since it looks like the game was singled out for the sole crime of becoming universally popular. Requests for comment and an explanation from Apple were not returned.

And now, for the fun part. The official statement released by Manitoba Games makes you either laugh or cry, but you can’t escape the feeling that they might actually have a strong point:

One thing we can promise you is that we will be back! The Apple version might need to be censored a bit to comply with Apple’s strictest requirement since they are going to be looking very attentively at what we submit from now on. Google never had a problem with the application itself. The problem was with our publisher and we are expecting to return to the Play Store once we find a suitable publisher.

As for the other platforms we will endeavor to make it as censorship free as possible while assigning the highest maturity rating to the game. We do not want kids playing Weed Firm, but we firmly believe that adults should have a choice to do whatever the hell they want as long as they are not hurting anybody in the process. If we let hypocrites determine what content is suitable for us we will soon all be watching teletubbies instead of Breaking Bad and playing… oh I don’t know… nothing good comes to mind, without some form of ‘illegal activity’ or other really.

The game developers also talk about other objectionable games and apps that are still available in the Apple store, such as the ones inciting people to crash cars, shoot civilians and, our favorite, crash birds into buildings. This is perfectly legit: the App Store is filled with games and apps that teach people how to grow pot, how to choose one strain of marijuana from another or how to cultivate gunja.

weed apps

Censorship or not, objectionable content or not, the fact remains: Weed Firm went out the App Store with a bang for being too successful! Had it been a Mario type of game, Apple would have issued a press release to brag about it. We may not approve the angry tone or the sarcasm, but one thing is certain: Apple just messed with the “freedom of speech” bunch.

YouTube Is Buying Twitch for $1 Billion

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twitch Nowadays it seems that Google buys companies one after another, flooding our news feed with details about rumored or confirmed acquisitions. After Quest Visual and Divide both announced they would be joining Google’s team, the freshest data available show that YouTube is buying Twitch for a bit over $1 billion.

Twitch is not the most popular start – up you know everything about, but, to paraphrase Daniel Bean, Twitch is a tech – mammoth, even if you don’t know this. The gaming live streaming service platform is so successful, in fact, that it competes with Amazon, Hulu and Facebook in terms of traffic, outranking all these three tech players during peak hours.

Twitch also harnesses the power of almost 45 million unique visitors monthly who pay for video ads and subscriptions.

So if this company is so successful, how come it is for sale?

Twitch has a very large pool of fans and interesting sources of revenue, but technically speaking, the Twitch platform can crumble under its own popularity at any given time. Poor image quality, lags whose duration is beyond absurd, management and maintenance costs that exceeded everybody’s expectations, these are all good reasons Twitch is looking for an investor.

They say Microsoft tried to make an offer to them, but the Twitch team didn’t want to be bound to the XBOX One for life. Instead, seizing the opportunity, Google sent YouTube to welcome Twitch to the big Google family and make it an offer. And the fact that YouTube is buying Twitch is a good thing for everybody involved in the process, companies and end – users alike.

According to Hayden Dingman from PC World,

Yes, investment cash could help Twitch build out for the long haul, but beyond the $1 billion, Google offers already-established infrastructure. Google offers (presumably) full YouTube integration, so there would be no more need to archive a video on Twitch, download it, and then upload to YouTube—an archaic and awful process people endure because they know the real money is made through YouTube and not Twitch. And most importantly, Google offers an enormous audience—the type of audience that probably doesn’t even know what Twitch.tv is.

Looking at the bigger picture, YouTube, and implicitly Google, wins over a larger audience and new and interesting sources of revenue without much effort. People know that YouTube didn’t succeed in becoming the favorite game live – streaming platform available, or at least not in comparison with Twitch. Therefore, buying the company and integrating Twitch into YouTube makes a lot of sense for both companies. While the actual purchase date still needs to be announced, all who cover this topic applaud the fact that YouTube is buying Twitch.

Halo 5 Is Coming in 2015

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halo 5Friday was a big day in the gaming world: 343 Industries and Microsoft announced that Halo 5 would be available for XBOX One in the fall of 2015. The much expected Halo 5 is coming in 60 frames per second and represents the pride and glory of both the game’s creators and Microsoft itself. A public statement released on XBOX Wire speaks about the journey represented by the Halo franchise, the mission, the vision and the expectations of its developers:

[quote]In the past, “Halo” games have pushed the Xbox forward, showcasing the console and its ecosystem in entertaining and innovative ways. Making a “Halo” game that runs at 60 frames per second, on dedicated servers, with the scope, features and scale we’ve been dreaming of for more than a decade, is non-trivial.  It’s a task that we, at 343 Industries, are taking very seriously to ensure we deliver the “Halo” game that fans deserve, and a game that is built from the ground up for Xbox One. I’m happy to reveal that “Halo 5: Guardians,” the next installment in the legendary saga of the Master Chief, will launch on Xbox One in fall of 2015.  In the tradition of every “Halo” game since its debut in 2001, it is a massive and exciting project.[/quote]

Microsoft couldn’t have had a better idea than this. If you remember the latest news, the tech behemoth took the decision of removing the Kinect camera from the XBOX One and thus sell a new series of game consoles at a lower price. Commentators agreed that this strategy was an important and necessary move from Microsoft’s part to keep up with the XBOX ONE archenemy, the Play Station 4. Now that everybody knows Halo 5 is coming next year, it is very possible that the XBOX One will attract larger numbers of customers and newer legions of fans.

And this is not all. The same official statement announced that Halo 5, known as Guardians, would also be a part of a bigger project. In 2015, the Halo series will be turned into a television series under the direct supervision of Steven Spielberg, a man who doesn’t need any further presentation when it comes to creating everlasting blockbusters. From this point of view, next year will be a hit in terms of gaming experiences and TV experiences for everybody. The gamers will finally have a new installment of a very successful game, while regular audience might become very interested in purchasing the console and the game while watching the TV series. Strategically speaking, Microsoft has every chance to outrank PS 4 on the market share and gain faithful followers from all over the world.

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