A couple of days ago I found a link to a video of a college student who was recreating the popular Arkham Horror board game for the PC. It wasn’t an official release by Fantasy Flight Games, but rather a graduation requirement for school. Her plan seems to be pretty solid. Since this is a school project, EU law covers this as fair use and she intends to present this post-grad to the guys from FFG and see if some partnership can be struck.

In the meantime, Andi needs your help. She’s looking for beta testers till Feb 5 2012. You may be an Arkham Horror fan — or a fan of board games in general and getting a free download definitely won’t hurt. The game looks epic. One of the things I never liked about Arkham Horror was that there were just too many expansions to play and I got into it pretty late. The game’s setup is also pretty tedious as you’ll need about 3 square meters of space to get this game really going. This digital edition solves everything.

It must be noted that this isn’t just a direct port of the game. It’s a “3D interactive” version of Arkham Horror where you actually walk around the board and do stuff.

The game is currently only available on the PC with support for old school LAN. VoIP support for multiplayer to be added in the future. But as of now, let’s give Andi our full support to make this game a reality!

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Justin Gary of Gary Games — better known as one of the Magic Pro-Tour players who founded the highly addicting deck building game, Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer. In this interview he hinted of an iOS version of the first expansion, Return of the Fallen due soon. And “soon” really meant before the holidays. For USD $2.99 you can upgrade your version of Ascension and buy RotF as an in-app purchase for USD $2.99.

BUY ASCENSION: RETURN OF THE FALLEN (USD $2.99)

Return of the Fallen introduces a new expansion deck which can be incorporated into the main game or played separately, albeit for 2 players only since there are fewer cards in this version. RotF is an exact replica of its deck building equivalent, sans the setup. For those unfamiliar, you can read the core mechanic in our initial preview. The new set adds the “Fate” concept where cards in the center row will behave according to the way the Fate instructions dictate. In this version you also have more abilities to play with, such as Arha Sensei, an Enlightened Hero that allows you to banish starter cards for Mystics of Heavy Infantry directly into your hand.

To buy the expansion all you need to do is upgrade your version of Ascension to its latest version, which adds the in-app purchase option. Apart from the expansion, the latest version adds support for online and offline play record keeping, player profiles (previously was lacking and a definite improvement!) and the ability to play the game using any config of Ascension, as a solo set or with mixed cards.

The new expansion also adds a new soundtrack and effects (some of the Creature kill FX are disturbing!), a new gallery for the expansion set cards, and a brand new refreshing title screen. Ascension has not however, added a third level of difficulty for the AI, something that iOS players will notice as being un-checkable in the options.

Ascension won’t make it to the Top List of iOS apps in the App Store but I well assure you that this game is epic. The additional USD $2.99 you’re going to spend + the initial USD $4.99 for the core set (that’s if you haven’t bought it yet) are so worth your money!

There’s a new game out for iOS and it’s called Brawl. The game made it to my radar for two reasons — first because it was a free release and secondly, it was a card-based boxing game. I’m a huge fan of deck building games like Ascension, Dominion and 7 Wonders so albeit this one makes use of much simpler rules (yep it’s really simple), I find the genre of fast-paced card action rather interesting.

The game itself isn’t very deep. Two boxers fight their way to victory and punches are thrown through cards. The winner is determined by whoever landed the most punches. A game consists of two player cards (boxers) and each player draws from a shuffled deck of punches and blocks. You can throw punches to the head and torso, represented by locations on the top and bottom part of the player cards. You can stack blows until a player draws and places a block card which means you won’t be able to land any more punches in that area.

Punches and blocks come in different colors. You can only stack punches of the same color and block with the corresponding color of punches.

Depth is achieved when you can add a third stack (red cards) which lets you throw additional punches and blocks. The game ends when you can no longer land any more punches and the total number of points (i.e. punches landed) determine the winner.

Variety takes place with the choice of boxers. There are three boxers initially available with three more unlocked via in-app purchases (surprise!). The boxers are characterized by the number of certain cards in the decks. For instance, Hale comes with more hit cards in all colors but very few blocks. Chris on the other hand comes with a balance of hits and blocks.

The game may take a while to master but after the tutorial and first few play through, a game can last no more than 1 minute. You can challenge the AI or play online.

Brawl is free on iOS and can be downloaded for both the iPad and iPhone. [DOWNLOAD NOW]

Add them up on Facebook too.

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer is by far one of my favorite card games. It’s right up there with 7 Wonders and Bang! Board Game Geek has awarded Ascension: CotG 3.5 stars out of 5 and the good news is that they full game is now available on iOS for a mere USD $4.99. The physical game costs USD $27.99.

Ascension: CotG is a deck building game for 2-4 players. The game was designed by a handful of Magic: The Gathering Pros and they wanted to build a fast-paced card game that didn’t rely on who had the better deck beforehand. Instead, players start off in equal footing and build the deck as they play. Winning entails computing the sum of Rune points acquired from creature kills and points from the types of cards you built your deck with during the game It’s good news to those that don’t want to spend a ton of money on booster packs and special cards as the core game is pretty much a standalone set good for 2-4 players already.

On to the iOS version. I can pretty much sum up the experience of CotG as quite similar to playing the actual card game. The UI is very well thought through with each card having a zoom in function anytime during a game session is ongoing. As the screen of your iOS device is limited, the board allows you to touch areas of the screen to pull out your summoned Constructs, view the Void and discard deck (you can hold and drag to see everything scroll by!) as well as see summaries of other player decks such as the number of constructs in play, number of Runes acquired and so on.

The game features both offline and online play. You can hold several offline games simultaneously as well as queue up in gaming lobbies for multiple games to see which one you can get into first. Because CotG is fast-paced by nature, wait times are never annoying.

Bottomline
Ascension: CotG is a definite MUST HAVE for the iOS. If you’ve never heard of the game till this review, you STILL should pick it up and I guarantee you that this will be one of the most played games on your iPad or iPhone.

[Download Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer]

Steam has recently released Spiral Knights, a free to play MMO that runs on their network. Developed by SEGA, the game is available on both Mac and PC. It’s a quick download for 300MB.

Spiral Knights looks like a typical dungeon crawl game. It’s not pretentious and it’s loads of fun. And yes I have to reiterate it’s free!

One of the best games from my childhood — and definitely one of the best games of all time is now available on digital download from GOG. At USD $5.99 it’s a definite steal. Alpha Centauri was a spin off from Sid Meier’s Civilization. No problems with compatibility here as this version works with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit). It also comes with the original manual in digital form.

Download now for USD $5.99.

I remember the first time I hacked into X-Com’s hex codes. I was in middle school and it was right about that time when Norton DOS came out. Apart from the colorful menus and new command lines, it came with a Norton code editor and it was then I discovered the joys of manipulating the in-game weapon values.

I found a way to edit the weapon templates so after saving a copy of the original file I’d have a little fun with the values. For instance, the stun rod was an instant kill. I changed the grenades and rockets to armor piercing, which became really hilarious to kill people by simply throwing a grenade or hitting someone with a huge rocket that didn’t explode. Oh and I turned Blaster Launcher ammo to an unlimited value.

Ah, X-Com. Those were the days. Now we can relive those days with Steam’s weekend deal putting the entire X-Com series from UFO Defense to Apocalypse for only USD $2.00. You end up saving almost thirty bucks. The complete set:

UFO Defense
Terror from the Deep
Interceptor
Enforcer
Apocalypse

Honestly, the others are crap. The first two are the ones worth playing.

In other news, you can also get Freedom Force for the same price, but only for this weekend!

According to a recent study (for Microsoft, no less) downloaded software is eight times more carbon efficient than its boxed equivalent.

Some interesting UK-based statistics suggest that if the 16 million units of software sold last year had been downloaded instead, there’d be enough electricity saved to power 12,000 households for a year. Imagine what the stats in the US would be.

Quite apart from any environmental savings, downloading software leads to instant gratification, and we don’t even have to go out to the store or get up to answer the door when the delivery guy calls!

Have credit card, will download — that’s my motto.

Sadly, major software titles tend not to be available as downloads, even though updates are usually available via the Internet, despite the fact that it could save companies a lot of money, as well as getting more contact details at the time of purchase.

DownloadBuyer.com is one site hoping to provide a central repository of legally downloadable software, though there are plenty of other sites offering similar services.

Would you download software packages if they were available, or do you like having the box and DVD as backup?

Here we have 11 Daft Punk tracks covered using 8-bit gaming systems:

1. Around The World by The Listrix
2. Short Circuit by Random
3. Voyager by Zombectro
4. Revolution 909 by Note!
5. Aerodynamic by Je deviens dj en 3 jours
6. Superheroes by Stage7
7. Crescendolls by Flashbob
8. One More Time by Microchip
9. Teachers by Fluxxin
10. Indo Silver Club by Motone
11. Veridis Quo by EvilWezil

Go grab the free download and cover art.

Via

Amazon UK has made a move that just might spark a “war” between online music stores. Yesterday, Amazon UK slashed its pricing on songs! We all know that one of the most popular online music stores is iTunes. In fact, I don’t think I have ever bought music from Amazon. That is why a lot of people are saying that this move by Amazon is actually a bid to attract some customers from iTunes.

With their current promo, Amazon is selling some of its top music downloads for a mere 29p! Compared to iTunes, you can make up to 70p savings on one song. Add that savings up if you buy lots of songs, and you make really considerable savings! Imagine having to pay only 3GBP for an album. Now isn’t that really cheap???

This move is really making waves everywhere. The Guardian even ran a feature on the promo, which by the way, is running indefinitely. Here are some of the tracks that you can get for 29p:

…Lily Allen’s The Fear and Lady GaGa’s Poker Face – to 29p.

On the bargain list, which spans pop, hip-hop, rock, classical and jazz, music fans can also find older tracks such as Oasis’s Wonderwall, the Dambusters March played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World.

I guess I am outta here – have to check the other tracks!