There’s no shortage of zombie games in the modern age, not even on mobile. And while zombies lend themselves especially well to action and shooter games, they also pop up in many other genres.  A couple of iOS examples: The Walking Dead is quite a popular adventure game, and cult favorite Zombies!!! mixes the undead with a dice-rolling board game.

Mobile publishing giant GREE has recently tossed its own hat into the world of zombie games with Beyond the Dead. Coming from GREE’s Vancouver-based studio, Beyond the Dead is more of a traditional mobile game than the two titles I just mentioned. But this one’s mixture of card collecting and town building with a zombie apocalypse still makes it worth a look for zombie-loving casual gamers.

Building a base

In Beyond the Dead, the world has been overrun by a plague of flesh-eating zombies. The player’s first order of business is to establish a base to defend against the undead. This begins with staking out a patch of land in the wilderness and setting up a tent to sleep in.

As time goes on, players can purchase new buildings and items for their settlement. These all fit the in-universe fiction of survival versus the zombie plague, such as a chicken coop producing food for your team. In actual gameplay terms, buildings mostly just produce silver (soft currency) over time. Checking in and collecting money to spend on further buildings and supplies becomes a core part of the gameplay routine.

Missions

From the homebase, you can browse and take on missions in the outside world. Again, bite-sized missions are a common component of mobile city building games. But Beyond the Dead outdoes many such games with the complexity and variety of missions it offers. You’ll have loads of them to choose from at any given time. Many are available for only a limited time, which creates a sense of urgency that you don’t usually get and also matches the desperate nature of the game’s setting.

Missions include such objectives as defeating certain enemies in an area, searching specific buildings, challenging other players, and more. The best part of these is that most involve visiting areas with actual complex maps and wandering zombies and then doing some exploration or combat. You can’t be killed while out in the wild, but looking around an area and hunting zombies is far more interesting than your average city builder’s gameplay.

The actual combat is still casual game simple, though. Just select the correct target enemy, tap Attack, and you’ll deal some damage. Each attack costs energy, as does searching buildings. Energy refills over time – remember, you’re supposed to return to Beyond the Dead throughout the day. But the energy costs and slow rate of refill do slow the game down and make it less exciting than it should be.

Completing missions gets you experience, silver, and battlefield lockers. These lockers contain random rewards of varying rareness. As for experience, you’ll level up when you gain enough of it. Level ups refill energy, unlock new items and buildings for purchase, and give you Skill Points with which to boost your team’s abilities.

Survivors

Building that team (only five survivors can fight together at a time) is the real draw in Beyond the Dead. Over 100 unique survivors wait to be found and join your team. Each survivor’s card displays beautiful artwork (much better drawn than the actual sprites, as usual with these games) and a backstory that fleshes out the game’s setting.

Survivors have their own attack and defense stats that determine how effectively the will perform in battle. They also come equipped with special abilities like the chance for the whole party to deliver extra damage during attacks. You can also boost their damage by finding or purchasing new weapons, each with its own range, rate of fire, and ammo capacity.

The ability to develop survivors adds depth as well. Each one can be not only leveled up, but also evolved into stronger forms. To level up a survivor, you must pay a silver fee and then combine him or her with other survivor cards or items. Fusing two similar survivors will evolve them into better ones. It takes a mixture of leveling and fusion to create a formidable team.

Dealing with other players

Another promising feature in Beyond the Dead is the ability to battle other players. You can challenge other teams at any time, as long as you have the adrenaline for it. Adrenaline is the PvP-specific energy currency and refills over time.

Fighting other players is not as exciting as it could be at this stage in the game. The screen displays each team’s lineup of character portraits and then simply tells you who won based on each team’s stats. No action scene, RPG-style combat, or anything. Hopefully GREE adds some visual pizazz to player challenges in a future update.

Still, player battles are worthwhile because the winner gets silver and Reputation Points. Consecutive wins provide better payouts, as does graduating to higher reputation tiers. You have to fight more PvP battles within a set time period if you want to stay within those better tiers.

The zombie apocalypse isn’t all just fighting other humans for supplies and fame, however. Likeminded players can also team up to form alliances. As an alliance member, you’ll receive team boosts and even free items on occasion. Of course, even the alliance feature has some competitive elements…

Beyond the Dead offers alliance-specific live events, not unlike an MMO. The first of these starts on January 31st - not far from now. During the event, alliances will be able to declare war on each other. Each war lasts an hour, and the victor gains Prestige Points. At the end of the event, alliances will receive rewards based on their Prestige ratings compared to the other alliances. Read more about the Bloodbath Alliance event here.

In-app Purchases

As a free to play game, Beyond the Dead relies on optional In-App Purchases (IAPs) in order to turn a profit. Some of these include Starter Packs that range in price from $1.99 on up and contain an assortment of items and survivors for the taking. If you want to build your team in a hurry, Starter Packs will get you on the right foot without breaking the bank.

The remaining IAPs consist of either silver or gold packs ranging from $4.99 up through crazy amounts. Gold, the hard currency, pays for a variety of functions. As you’d expect, energy and adrenaline refills cost gold, not silver. Paying for energy in games is like a bottomless well to throw money into, so you might be better off using gold for other purposes. The best of these is buying rare and powerful survivors.

Keeping ahead of the undead

Beyond the Dead is off to a great start. It’s simple enough that anybody can play it, but the dark zombie theme, diversity of mission activities, collectible survivor cards, and PVP elements all make for a compelling experience.

The one complaint that practically every player seems to share concerns the game’s stinginess with energy and the high energy costs of mid-mission activities. Of course GREE needs to make money from the game, but trying to drain players of their life savings on energy (something you’ll always need) is not the best way to do it. Far better to sell interesting items that will make missions easier or give alliances an edge in PvP, if you ask me.

The Beyond the Dead team plans to support and improve the game in the long term, which means the energy situation and other bugs might get better as time goes on. Those enhancements and the promise of more live events certainly bring some hope to this particular zombie apocalypse.

• Free – Download Now

Plague Inc. is one of the more popular games on the iOS App Store, and with good reason. Players gently guide and evolve a disease in an attempt to wipe out humanity, battling government research efforts. Increasing transmission, deadliness, and severity are all core to the success, but also ensuring that you have enough healthy hosts to thrive on. Different disease types enjoy different characteristics and offer new strategic options. It's a grim premise, but an entertaining one. If you've already been playing for awhile and are looking for ways to get more out of the game, check out some of our helpful Plague Inc. hints below!

1. Infect before killing

One of the key strategies to winning Plague Inc. is to make sure your disease, no matter the type, is highly transmittable. Pouring DNA points into deadly symptoms early on will kill off all of the hosts in a country, stopping its spread, raise alarms, and shut down ports of entry into isolated countries. In the early game, invest in transmission, and make sure every country on the globe has at least a few infected within its borders. Odds are symptoms will naturally mutate on their own over time, and some of them, like coughing, can help a lot with infectivity. Even once you start investing heavily into lethal symptoms, be sure to keep putting a few points into transmission until the whole world is infected. The easiest way to tell if your virus is too deadly is if your number of infected is going down at a steady rate as the death toll rises.

2. Start in an isolated country

My two go-to beginning countries are Madagascar and Greenland. Warm, low-income, high-density countries like India might seem like a better choice, but they’re easy enough to overrun, especially once your disease has gathered momentum elsewhere. Madagascar and Greenland, however, only have the one port of entry and are hard to get to otherwise (even with bird migrations). I’ve lost many games because there was a token handful of survivors in either of these locations, while my virus managed to wipe out the rest of the world.

3. Watch the news

You’ll get occasional pop-ups for especially dramatic news, but be sure to comb through the headlines after tapping the News icon at the top. Help you see at a glance which countries you will need to target, and which are falling into anarchy well enough on their own. New medical breakthroughs can also steer you away from certain symptoms, while random events may make some countries particularly good targets.

4. Research countries

When you tap on a country on the map, you’ll notice a little “i” next to their name at the bottom of the screen. Tap that, and you’ll get some interesting information about the country, including climate, number of infected, healthy, and dead. This can all be important stuff to know when, for example, targeting a country that is leading the global cure effort. For a higher-level view, tap the World button in the bottom-right, tap the Data tab at the top, and tap Infection Spread Summary. If there’s anything left in the Healthy Countries column, you’ve got work to do.

5. Plan your evolution

The price of all disease upgrades go up as you purchase others with DNA points. That said, figure out which high-level abilities you want, and make a beeline for it. Those abilities will get consummately more expensive if you spread out your upgrades among multiple paths. Total organ failure and coma are good destinations on the Symptoms tree, while Extreme Bioaerosol will make sure the disease can keep moving around by plane and boat regardless of technological improvements.

Hack your way to global anarchy

As for cheats, there are a few available within the game already, but only after you’ve completed stages on on Brutal. If you have a jailbroken device, however, you can give yourself unlimited DNA towards that goal. Find the Plague.app folder with your favorite file viewer, and open up bacteria.txt in the editor. Find the mention of Air1 in that file, and scroll down to the cost value. Replace it so it reads something along the lines of “cost:+999”. While you’re in there, you can also crank up the infectiouness score to 999 (without the “+”) to get an easy win on Brutal. Now when you get the Air infectivity upgrade, you’ll be granted 999 DNA to spend willy-nilly, and it will make your virus infinitely infectious.

Your top tips, tricks, and cheats?

With those tips, you should be leading mankind to total and utter ruin in no time. What are your favorite ways of shuffling civilization into an era of endless despair? If you haven't tried out Plague Inc. yet, don't let all the doom and gloom bring you down; it's surprisingly fun and challenging. Go ahead and download it from the App Store, and let us know what you think in the comments!

The Mac App Store arrived just in time to save Mac gaming, but it's unfairly restricted Mac game publishers and Mac gamers alike.

As I've written before, the Mac has long had a troubled history with game development. But the introduction of the Mac App Store in 2010 came just in time to save the business. It's the best thing that's happened to Mac gaming. It's also the worst. Let me explain.

In 2009, things were getting dire for Mac game publishers. Apple retail stores were one of the very few places that Mac owners could find games, and shelf space was rapidly shrinking in favor of higher-volume products like iPhone cases and accessories.

Some publishers were experimenting with online distribution, but with a few exceptions they weren't there yet. What's more, getting consumers to buy software from a web site they're unfamiliar with can be difficult, especially as online customers gain awareness about issues like identity theft — there's simply a trust issue.

Just in time to save the business, but at what cost?

So Mac game sales were going nowhere fast.

In March of 2010, Steam opened its doors to OS X for the first time and before too long major commercial games and indie games alike were being released through it — including many original games that hadn't been seen on the Mac elsewhere.

Later that year Apple opened the Mac App Store, a Mac version of their enormously popular and successful App Store for iOS products. The Mac App Store provided all OS X app developers with another way to digitally distribute their software, one that had an instant customer base of hundreds of millions of customers, thanks to its use of the Apple ID.

The Mac App Store has been a fixture of the Macintosh ever since — it's one of the default icons on the Dock of every Mac screen, tied into credentials that in the vast majority of cases, they've already created for their iPod touch, iPhone or iPad.

The problem is that the Mac App Store lives in its own little bubble. And when it comes to games — in particular, games that have a multiplayer component — that's not good.

Apple places restrictions on the apps sold through Mac App Store, and one of them is that you have to use Game Center.

Now, Game Center provides a framework for matching multiplayer games, and also gives players the opportunity to compare skills and unlock achievements. Similar systems exist elsewhere. But Apple requires developers to use Game Center to the exclusion of any other game matching system. So a game sold via the Mac App Store can't communicate for multiplayer games with a game that's sold on Steam, for example.

A mac gaming ghetto

This relegates Mac App Store customers to only playing with other Mac App Store customers, even if the game's original code was designed to support other systems. And with fewer Mac gamers than PC gamers out there, that means fewer opponents and less availability for online games.

In some cases, the Mac App Store version of a game will have its multiplayer component torn right out all together. Case in point: Feral Interactive's recently-released Mac port of Tomb Raider.

This also prevents some really big game launches from ever coming to the Mac App Store. EA and Maxis's Mac version of SimCity, for example, heavily depends on its connection with EA-hosted servers in order to work. An offline mode is coming, but the game still relies on that server connection for multiplayer capabilities, which is verboten to Apple.

Better alternatives elsewhere

Games sold outside the Mac App Store, even those not purchased directly Steam, can still use Steam's multiplayer gaming framework, making it possible to play with Mac, PC and sometimes even Linux players who have the same games as you.

Valve's focused on making Mac games part of their Steam Play program, which means that you makes your game synchronize its save files in the cloud. It also means that when you buy a game, you most frequently get the PC version too — so you can not only play your game from anywhere, but you can do so on any machine.

There's another advantage to buying games through Steam, too — there are frequent, well-advertised sales. And thanks to Steam Play, it's usually both the Mac and the PC version that goes on sale at the same time — so you can take advantage of deep discounts, like The Bureau: XCOM Declassified's Mac Steam launch last weekend.

In short, buying games from the Mac App Store means only playing online with other Mac users. It relegates you to a ghetto of other Mac gamers unfortunate enough to have purchased the game through the Mac App Store as well. And it often means you pay more for the same game than you would have paid elsewhere. Last, it keeps some games from ever appearing in front of the millions of prospective customers that have the Mac App Store installed on their computers.

The Mac App Store arrived at a time that Mac game publishers desperately needed a lifeline. It provides a safe and trusted way for Mac users, especially new ones, to get third-party software for their computers. But it also enforces a status quo that unfairly penalizes developers and customers alike, and it creates an ugly dependency. It's an example of where Apple's "walled garden" approach fails.

I understand that Apple wants to protect its customers, but by setting up Mac App Store restrictions the way they have, they've hamstrung customers and developers alike. It's not fair or equitable, and I think it should change.

What do you think? Have you bought games through the Mac App Store? Did you know you'd be restricted for online gaming, or is it unimportant to you? Let me know what you think in the comments.

iMore has been known to cover a gaming event or two, whether it’s E3, GDC, or even PAX. These shows offer a great chance for us to learn about hot games coming to iOS as well as interview our favorite game developers.

This week we’ll be attending a new mobile industry event for the first time: Apps World. This one takes place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California on February 5th and 6th. Apps World is special to me for two reasons. For one, it’s the first event I’ll be covering for iMore. And two: I’ll be representing Mobile Nations as a judge at a contest for game developers called the Big Indie Pitch during the event. The Big Indie Pitch is open to the public if you register in advance.

Apps World

This event is dedicated to mobile games and apps; just the kind of stuff we love to play and use on our iPhones and iPads. Targeted at mobile developers and exhibitors, the event consists of two days of panels, discussions, and exhibits dedicated to producing better mobile software and technology. Check out the Apps World website to learn more.

While Apps World’s workshops will be dedicated to a number of mobile topics like TV apps, HTML5, and monetization, the subject we’re most interested in is gaming. Tons of iOS developers will be exhibiting and speaking at the event, so we’ll be sure to hit them up for all the gaming news and interviews we can get our hands on.

Big Indie Pitch

Sponsored by AppFlood/Papaya Mobile and Pocket Gamer, the Big Indie Pitch is a special opportunity for indie game developers to pitch their games to the press. If we like what we see, our coverage will help those developers’ games get noticed.

30 small-sized development teams (four members or less) will have three minutes each to promote one of their games to the judges. The winning game gets pitched to the entire audience at the end of the event.

This year’s judges include:

• Paul Acevedo, Your friendly neighborhood Games Editor, Mobile Nations (Android Central, iMore, Windows Phone Central)
• Andre F. Bourque, Managing Editor, Technorati
• Steve Peterson, West Coast Editor, GamesIndustry.biz, [a]listdaily
• Jeff Scott, Editor In Chief, 148Apps
• Zoya Street, Deputy Editor, GamesBrief  
• Michael Ehrenberg, Former App Store Marketing Manager, Apple
• Martine Paris, US Editor, Pocket Gamer
• Fernando Pizarro, GM Americas, PapayaMobile

The Big Indie Pitch takes place from 2-4:30PM this Thursday, February 6th in San Francisco. For more details or a free pass, head over to EventBrite.

Stay tuned this week and next for our Apps World and Big Indie Pitch coverage. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for all of those stories, and then follow me directly @PaulRAcevedo even more madness from the event.

Between its charming 8-bit look, thankless challenge curve, and pared-down controls, Slayin has found a sweet spot in iOS gaming. Players only have one life to make their way through as many waves of enemies and bosses as possible, while collecting treasure along the way. Your hero is constantly moving forward, weapon drawn - all you have to do is steer them left or right, and jump when appropriate. The gold coins gathered can be spent on equipment which, with any luck, will buy you another minute or two, but ultimately everybody falls to the unrelenting hordes of fantasy monsters. Over time, your heroics earn you fame points which can be spent on unlocking new heroes and new game modes.

That’s Slayin in a nutshell, but if you need some help getting into it, we’ve got some tips to make sure you’re hacking and slashing your way to level 100.

• $0.99 - Download now

1: Get the dragon scale first

You may be tempted to spend your hard-earned Fame Points on a new hero right out of the gate, but hold that thought. The Dragon Scale, costing 5000 FP, will grant you an extra life, which will in turn increase how much fame your bring back with every round, and also stem the monotony of having to start over from scratch again.

2: Always buy armor

Survivability is your biggest challenge, so don’t skimp on armor when the opportunity arises. Meat is also available to replenish health, and though its cost increases with every serving, it’s often worth topping up. If your armor is depleted and the vendor pops up, it’s worth your while to work your way to him to get more armor.

4. Command one side of the battlefield

It’s hard to get by when you’re surrounded on all sides, so pick one edge of the screen and stay close to it. Clear out enemies as soon as they get close, and only venture across to the other half periodically. This might mean that levels take a little while longer to clear, but you’ll certainly be playing it safe. Get in the habit of a circular attack pattern: jump forwards to clear airborne enemies or avoid incoming ground obstacles, plow through a few on the ground, then head back to pick up loot and clear out any fresh spawns.

5. Know when to leave loot alone

Don’t ruin a great score multiplier and lose a bunch of health just for a few gold coins. Treasure disappears quickly, and it’s hard not to charge towards it whenever something drops, but resist temptation. The gold only really helps you to stay alive, but can only do so much in the hands of a brave suicidal adventurer. The only real exception to this would be to go after treasure chests, but even then, it’s best to err on the side of caution.

Cheat: Get 500 Fame Points for free

After playing for awhile, you’ll get a pop-up suggesting that you rate the game and get 500 Fame Points. The thing is (and this goes for any game that tries to entice you to rate and earn in-game currency), there’s no way for them to confirm you actually rated their game. Tap “Yes, rate it”, it’ll boot you out to the App Store, but you can switch right back without having written a thing. Now, Slayin is a great game and you should leave it a nice review, but strictly speaking, it’s not required.

Finally, here’s a list of the bosses you’ll encounter and a quick look at their attacks and how to approach them.

Boss list for Slayin

• Minotaur: Leap over as he charges, then attack from behind.
• Royal Slime: Splits in two and speeds up with every attack. Clear smaller spawns before attacking larger one again.
• Imp: Teleports to either side. Fires linear fireballs at ground level, wave-path fireballs from higher.
• Peloria: Avoid sprouts and attack main body before she attacks and goes back underground.
• Death Worm: Avoid disturbed ground, attack sides after it erupts.
• Harpy: Makes diagonal, burst feather attacks, and occasional dive bomb attacks. Strike from below.
• Spectral rider: Teleports to either side while steed stomps and unleashes ground flame attack, then dismounts, flies, and flings energy attacks.
• Dragon: Breathes fireballs at ground- and mid- level, unleashes volleys of four fireballs from above. Attack when head is highest.

Your top tips, tricks, and cheats?

That's about all we've got for Slayin, but be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts on classes and general strategies for Slayin! If you haven't given it a shot, be sure to download Slayin from the App Store.

If you're new to the Macintosh, or even if you've had one for a while, you may be interested in putting the work aside from time to time and playing games on your lovely machine. Macs may not have the same number of games as Windows PCs, but there are still plenty of places to get them if you know where to look. Here are some of my favorites. What are yours?

Steam

Valve's Steam service has been available for the Mac for a while now, and offers a pretty rich combination of indie and commercial titles for the Mac. They have their own Mac OS X section, which makes it very easy for Mac gamers to find what they're looking for.

What's more, Valve puts Mac gamers on a pretty even playing field with their Windows counterparts when it comes to sales and promotions — so you can usually get the same remarkable discounts. This weekend, for example, they're doing a free play weekend for the popular FPS Borderlands 2, with a 50 percent discount available as well.

Mac App Store

I've already said my piece about what I perceive to be the problems with the Mac App Store. But those issues notwithstanding, Apple deserves credit for bringing forth a robust marketplace for Mac app developers. What's more, Mac App Store is baked right in to OS X and uses Apple ID credentials, which means that it instantly has a potential user base of almost half a billion accounts, many more than the total number of Macs in use today.

The Mac App Store features indie and commercial titles alike, and also keeps lists of top paid and top free games, so there's something to appeal to gamers regardless of the budget. You can usually find the latest hot releases for Mac offered here, but sometimes it's a good idea to compare to Steam to see if you're getting the best deal.

MacGameStore

Even before the Mac App Store launched, MacGameStore came on the scene to provide Mac gamers with the latest downloads. In fact, they've been serving up games to Mac customers since 2005.

You can buy games directly from the web site, though there's a handy app that you can use if you prefer. MacGameStore regularly runs specials and deals, and if demos are available you can find links to them there too.

GameAgent.com

GameAgent.com started out as Mac game publisher Aspyr's way of reaching out to its own customers, but since then it's grown into an active Mac gaming service that offers downloads not just of Aspyr games but of other company's products too. They sport deals, favorites and games under $10, to make it easy to find something you might like.

If you set up an account with GameAgent, you can also use their Mac Match service to find out what games are supported on your system, taking the guesswork out of system requirements. You can also create a wish list, get access to special deals and more.

Feral Interactive

Mac game publisher Feral Interactive is a perennial darling of the Mac App Store, but you can usually find their games through other Mac game services too. If you'd prefer to go direct to the source, Feral is happy to take your money — they run their own Mac game download service, which is exclusive to their games.

Feral follows the "traditional" model of Mac game publishing — they license top rated games from PC and console game publishers, then produce and publish Mac versions. So if you want the new Tomb Raider game, for example, or XCOM: Enemy Within, you know where to look.

GameTree Mac

TransGaming is a company that mostly stays behind the scenes — they're content to convert games to the Mac using their Cider technology (which has its distant origins in the open-source WINE project) and let the publishers themselves to the heavy lifting. But they also operate their own game sales service, called GameTree Mac.

GameTree Mac has the usual Mac-compatible products from other commercial and indie game publishers, but they also sport the titles that TransGaming has worked on, which often can't be found through other services. So there are some exclusives there that might peak your interest.

GOG.com

GOG.com— what was once branded as "Good Old Games"— specializes in selling "vintage" computer software. They do have some more recent releases like Torchlight, for example, but much of their specialty has to do with resurrecting games from the DOS and early Windows era, recycled to run on modern hardware.

They're much better about supporting the Mac than they used to be, and you can usually find games for $6 — $10 without too much of a problem. Just be advised that GOG.com games are typically running inside some emulation layer or shell in order to operate and haven't been updated, so you're getting the real look and feel of vintage games, with their unusual control schemes and blocky graphics to boot.

GamersGate

GamersGate is another online service where you can download Mac and PC games alike. The service is clientless, just like most of the other services we've talked about, but one cool thing about GamersGate is that they have "gamified" the experience of using their service with a rewards system.

The more active you are on their boards — posting reviews, ratings, solving problems for other gamers, and more — the more "Blue Coins" you'll earn, which will get you discount on future orders. You'll also gain experience points, which will entitle you to special discounts on games.

Straight from the source

More and more Mac game publishers are hopping on board with support for the platform for their own download services. Electronic Arts'Origin, for example, is where you'd go to download SimCity and connect to other players. Want to buy popular Blizzard games like World of Warcraft or Diablo III? Off to Battle.net with you, then.

So look around — Mac games are a lot more available than you might think. And have fun gaming!

Do you have other favorite places to buy Mac games? Sound off in the comments.

This weekend we're testing out a new series called Fund This, where we highlight new or soon-closing crowdfunding campaigns that relate to the iPhone, iPad, Mac or just mobile in general. Many entrepreneurs are learning to use services like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to get early-stage funding from the public, which provides a ton of creative independence compared to traditional models. That said, we've got a role to play in getting the word out about promising products that are coming down the pipe, since it often means that you fine readers can get some pretty cool stuff at a good price (provided that it might take awhile to actually ship). So, let's dig into our first project coming from Kickstarter, called Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians.

Unsung Story is a project from Playdek, who have pumped out some very successful iOS board game adaptations such as Lords of Waterdeep, Agricola, and Ascension. For Unsung Story, they've managed to wrangle the original designer of Final Fantasy Tactics, Yasumi Matsuno, which sets a high bar as far as expectations go. Unsung Story is described as "tactical war simulation RPG" that pulls players through a series of medieval-style battles peppered throughout the history of a fantasy kingdom called Rasfalia. Your position in these battles shift regularly, so you're not necessarily fighting for the same side every round. Throughout, players have to guide the progression of their troops through various classes, like war mage, polearm knight, dragon tamer, and aerolest, which are nestled beneath broad professions, like clergy, noble, pioneer, and estate. Each hero you play as will have its own storyline with a unique perspective on the broad-spanning Seventy-Seven Years War. At launch, there should be about five episodes, each composed of four to six stages each.

Not only are all of the parties involved with this project highly reputable, but there's a dearth of great turn-based fantasy combat games out on iOS. Ravenmark: Mercenaries is taking the claim to fame in that sphere for now, but Unsung Story stands to present a whole lot more in the way of visual and audio polish. I'm also a big fan of how the Mac version is being developed in tandem with mobile. Originally, Unsung Story was meant to be a mobile game, but there was enough demand in a Mac and other platforms for Playdek to warrant a Kickstarter campaign. Despite trying to support multiple platforms, Playdek sounds confident about keeping the quality up to snuff.

"We uphold quality to the fullest and we will not allow the game to suffer due to multiple platforms. If we are successful, the players playing on their iOS device will have the same exact game the PC players have. Also by meeting this campaign goal we will be able to add more to the game such as a deeper story line, more content, and more creative individuals to make this a better game."

For $20, you can secure yourself a digital copy of the game for iOS or Mac when it launches sometime in July 2015. As always, remember that "Kickstarter is not a store," so timelines can be pushed back, or projects cancelled (just look at the sad story of Clang.) Hit up Unsung Story's Kickstarter page for a look at further reward tiers and stretch goals.

So what do you think of Unsung Story? Compelling enough for you to back it? We'd appreciate your feedback!

The best iPhone and iPad games to get your mind off Flappy Bird's demise

Now that the absolutely insane Flappy Bird title is gone from the App Store, you may be looking for something to cleanse your gaming palate. For all of its addictiveness (which is the very reason the developer removed it), Flappy Bird presented a ton of frustration, and was ultimately pretty simplistic. So here are some games to help you get away from birds, endless runners, 8-bit graphics, and one-touch controls.

Threes!

Maybe you’d rather mellow out a little bit. Threes! offers easygoing, thoughtful gameplay without ads or in-app purchases. Players slide a board of numbered tiles in four directions in order to get adjacent and identically-numbered tiles to stack on top of one another. Every turn introduces a new tile on the board, which means you’ve got to be diligent in continuing the stack. Once you’re out of moves, the sum total of your tiles are tallied up for a final score, which gets posted on the Game Center leaderboards.

The charming art style and music combine with elegant, simple gameplay to make something really unique.

• $1.99 - Download Now

Republique

A flappy bird bashing his head into soil and pipes isn’t exactly a thrilling narrative. For something with a juicy story, excellent graphics, and, most importantly, has an ending, try out the first episode of Republique. This stealth strategy game puts players in the voyeuristic role of a hacker trying to help a girl named Hope to escape from a compound ruled by a totalitarian regime. It’s unclear just how widespread the dystopia goes, but even just the first couple of hours of gameplay offered by this episode are enough to keep you interested in what comes next.

Republique is beautiful and full of compelling voice acting and gameplay.

• $4.99 - Download Now

Hundreds

If you’re looking for something with a proper sense of achievement and finality, try out Hundreds. This minimalist puzzle game presents players with a series of challenges whereby they have to inflate (or deflate) numbered dots on the screen until the sum of their value adds up to 100. This goal is hampered by the fact that if your inflation or deflation cause the dot to touch anything else, then you lose and have to start over.

Hundreds demands a fine mix of precision timing and strategic thinking in a slickly-designed package.

• $4.99 - Download Now

Octagon

If you just can’t shake the need for speed, Octagon offers great gameplay that’s still challenging, but not nearly as impossible or endless as Flappy Bird. Players navigate a trippy polygonal landscape with a 2D ball by swiping left and right to avoid falling off the edge. Swiping up causes the ball to jump up to whatever platform is above, which can be altogether fun and disorienting. The nice thing here is that each stage’s layout is fixed, which means over time, you can memorize what comes next, and eventually get to the end, ready to take on the next stage.

Octagon’s polished interface and thumping soundtrack make for a runner that won’t have you smashing your device in frustration.

• $1.99 - Download Now

Pathogen

If you want to get really thinky, Pathogen is an interesting biology-themed competitive puzzle game. Players use three different cell types and a virus to grow over an entire map. Being mindful of which cells are touching which are of the utmost importance when determining how to proceed. There are shades of Othello here with the turn-based structure, tile layout, and method of capturing pieces, but this is a decidedly unique experience. The addition of online and local multiplayer plus a level editor provides lots of strategic options.

For something competitive and pensive, give Pathogen a try.

• $0.99 - Download Now

What are your Flappy Bird replacements?

So we've got games that encourage you to think, offer reasonable tests of reflexes, bring high-fidelity graphics to the table, and not a single, stupid bug-eyed bird among them. That should help you through your Flappy Bird detox. How many of you have yet to kick the habit? Are you leaving Flappy Bird installed on your iPhone or iPad?

Recently my 13 year old son wanted to install some new software on his Mac but found that he didn't have a lot of disk space. Surprising, given that his Mac mini came with a 320 GB hard drive. So we did some snooping around and discovered the culprit: dozens of gigabytes of space taken up with games that were installed using Valve's Steam software. We deleted what he wasn't using and freed up more than 80 GB! Here's how you can do the same:

• Open your Applications folder and double-click on Steam to open the app.
• Click on the Library tab at the top of the Steam window.
• All the games in white are ones that have been installed locally. The greyed out ones are linked to your account, but not installed.
• Find the game you want to delete, then command click the game name.
• Select Delete Local Content...
• Click the Delete button to confirm.

Steam is a little unusual, in that it doesn't stick downloaded games in the regular Applications folder. Even if you tell it to create an alias when the game is installed, that's all it's doing - Steam is putting a pointer file in the Applications folder, not the full app. Out of sight is out of mind, so some folks forget about the game files themselves when they move on to other pastimes. This is the most surgical way to delete locally stored Steam games you no longer want to play.

If you've deleted Steam, or you no longer have an active account and want to remove those files manually, there's a way to do it yourself:

• Go to the Finder.
• Hold down the option key and select the Go menu.
• Select Library.
• Open Application Support.
• Locate the Steam folder.
• You can delete that folder to get rid of the local files Steam has stored.

That's it! Hopefully you can get back some space you've lost from games that you don't play anymore.

Does this help you get back any disk space? Have any other ideas for how to shrink the amount of unused stuff on your Mac? Let me know in the comments.

Adventure Time fans chewing through the Card Wars campaign will want to check out these hints for flooping their way to domination.

Card Wars — Adventure Time allows iPhone and iPad players to enjoy all of the charm of the cartoon show while playing through a high fantasy strategic card game. Players take turns summoning creatures onto one of four territories, attacking with them in a reflex-driven mini-game, and defending against attackers from opposing territories.

In between, players cast spells, activate, err, floop creature powers, build structures, and initiate character-specific super powers to take out their foe. It’s a linear single-player game with a level progression not unlike Candy Crush Saga, complete with timers for how often you can play and progressively more difficult stages, but the deck-building element keeps things fresh and creative. If you’re really digging the gameplay, there’s a proper physical card game available with considerably deeper gameplay.

So, how do you do well in this cutely branded, lightly freemium card game? Well, here are some pointers to get you started off. If you’re wondering where there game’s inspiration comes from, you can watch the episode of Adventure Time here if you’ve got 10 minutes to kill.

• $3.99 - Download Now

1. Stick with one land type if you can

Nothing is worse than having one of your lanes entirely open because you aren’t able to draw a creature of a specific land type. Though having, for example, all corn fields, can make you vulnerable to certain debuffs, like the pig’s floop, it’s ultimately worth it in order to keep your lanes well-populated and protected. If you want to mitigate risk against your land type, try adopting a second, but going up to three will likely be more hassle than it’s worth.

2. Activate hero abilities as soon as possible

You get to use your hero ability every three turns, so you want to make sure to pop them as early as possible so you can put some time into the cooldown for the next one soon. Sometimes it’s not entirely practical, such as using Jake’s ability for extra magic points when you have nothing to cast or floop, but at the very least, don’t forget you have the abilities. They can often make or break a round.

3. Use your gems on chests

There are a few sneaky freemium-style timers built into Card Wars, but don’t be fooled into burning up your gems for more hearts to keep playing or to retry lost matches. Instead, use your gems to open chests and get rare cards. Though it may be easy to default to the Algebraic chest since it has higher-rarity cards, that doesn’t necessarily translate to in-game value. Once you have a few heavy-hitting creatures from an Algebraic Chest, you can probably get by on the lower-grade Cool Chest.

4. Work on three-starring earlier missions when timers get long

If you’re having a lot of trouble beating higher levels, go back to previous stages and try to complete the quests. If you can get three stars, you’ll earn gems, which are handy for earning new cards from chests, as well as level up and find new cards in regular chests. Those new cards may very well help you bust through your higher-level challenge.

5. Practice the Battle Wheel

It’s common for a lot of players to turn off the battle wheel since it’s fairly difficult to use effectively, but with practice, your timing improves and gives even the weakest creatures a chance to deflect attacks from heavy-hitters. Some players even consider this advantage as cheating, but I’d say it’s worth it. Besides, this adds a bit of twitchy excitement to the standard board game formula.

Your tips, tricks, and cheats for Card Wars?

Those are just our suggestions for getting started with card wars, but what are your strategies? How far have you made it through the campaign? Leave a comment!

Boy, MFi game controller support on iOS 7 hasn't worked out the way I hoped it would. Right now, it's a mess.

When Apple announced MFi controller support in iOS 7 at WWDC last June, I got excited. The iPhone and iPad are tremendously powerful devices and there are lots of great games, but not every game is good with touch screen controls. The lack of tactile response, the obscuring of what's happening on screen, and the sometimes-awkward hold you have to make to grip the device all added up to frustration for me, over and over again.

MFi controller support seemed like a great compromise: gamers who wanted real game controls would be able to get devices that worked. And the fact that support was built in to the operating system meant broad support.

Or so I thought. Five months after iOS 7's release, there's still only a relative handful of games that make use of MFi game controllers. Not to mention a paucity of MFi controllers.

What's more, the controllers that are available are either ridiculously specialized like the MOGA Ace Power and Logitech PowerShell, both designed to turn an iPhone into a handheld game console a la the Sony PlayStation Vita or Nintendo DS. They're also quite expensive expect to spend $70-$100 on one — even more than the cost of a game controller for a "real" console like an Xbox or PlayStation.

I recently put SteelSeries' Stratus game controller through its paces, which I quite like — but I came away feeling that MFi game controller support in iOS 7 is a nice benefit but not a must have, partly because the experience is so disjointed and inconsistent, with it not at all clear as to which games have MFi controller support and which don't.

Apple has to shoulder a lot of the blame here. The company has done a horrendous job of promoting games that have MFi controller support. There's no way to differentiate them in the App Store outside of checking the release notes for individual games. (Kevin MacLeod at AfterPad has assembled a list of MFi controller compatible games to help fill in the blanks — make sure to bookmark it.)

I'm beginning to get the feeling that MFi game controller support is going to be one of those orphaned technologies that Apple just ignores until it withers and dies, sort of lie what the company did with iTunes Ping.

Meanwhile, over in the Android world, we've seen specialized game systems like the Nvidia Shield appear — devices that work with Android software, but transcend the standard smartphone experience all together.

We've seen no such innovation from Apple, which brought us the "funnest iPod ever," right?

I've been carrying the mantle of Apple gaming for decades — I started my first Mac-centric game site back in 1994, and have been watching the business grow, shrink, and change ever since. iOS devices came and soon after the App Store arrived, and at that point gaming exploded on the platform. Games still take up the largest single chunk of the App Store, and represent a huge market and a huge draw for iOS customers.

Why Apple has such half-assed game controller support in iOS 7 is completely beyond my understanding. Making gaming on iOS devices a richer, more compelling experience should be a top priority in Cupertino. Instead, the way it is right now, it feels like a joke.

Polish games maker Artifex Mundi is best known for their hidden object games like Nightmares from the Deep: the Cursed Heart. But they also publish games from other studios, such as fellow Polish developer Nimbi.

The two companies have teamed up to produce The Deadlings, which has just launched on iOS today. Instead of a hidden object adventure, the Deadlings is a clever and whimsical puzzle game starring a bunch of surprisingly lovable zombies. Haven’t we all seen enough of the scary ones anyway?

Deadlings has a whimsical premise in which zombies have overrun the streets and gotten in everyone’s way. Death sees the problem as an opportunity to make some friends, so he pulls the undead minions off of the streets and puts them to work in his factory. There he aims to train them to be productive citizens instead of just sitting around watching Dancing With the Stars all day.

Death has a variety of Deadlings to command, with each type specializing in different actions. Bonesack can run and jump; Creep sticks to ceilings and sings Radiohead songs (maybe not the singing); Lazybrain moves slowly and carefully; and Stencher flies around by passing gas. Nasty, but that’s zombies for you.

Players will use their arsenal of Deadlings to solve over 100 puzzles. You’ll have to switch back and forth between the different undead dudes in order to complete the more complex levels. The more tasty brains your minions collect during a level, the better your rating. With so many puzzles and two different modes to play – strategy and arcade – you’ll have a tough time outliving the Deadlings.

As usual with Artifex Mundi's games, Deadlings is on sale for a special introductory price at launch. You might want to get it now before the price goes up.

• $1.99 – Download Now

Puzzle & Dragons is a massively popular game out of Japan that continues to be among the top free-to-play titles in the App Store. True to its Japanese roots, you’re going to find a lot of Pokemon-style creatures and statistics here, but at its core is a match-3 game along the same vein as Candy Crush Saga.

The gameplay is decidedly more deep, with massive creature selection, progression and upgrading. This depth may pose some serious challenges to players trying out the game for the first time, but we've got some tips to help you get started and clearing out dungeons in no time.

1. Restart the tutorial until you get a high-quality god

When first starting out, you’ll be shown the ropes through a tutorial level and eventually get to buy your first god. The quality of that hero will be rated in stars, and will be doing a lot of heavy lifting for your team. To maximize how well you do out of the gate and in the long term, you want to make sure that it’s a really great [ocl. If it isn’t, uninstall the game, reinstall, and run through the tutorial again. It’s a bit of a hassle, but will ensure you do well in the long haul. There are plenty of opinions on which gods are ideal for your “starting pull”. If you’re willing to put the time in, keep going until you get Horus, Isis, Archangel Lucifer, Bastet, Kushinada, or Umisachi and Yamasachi.

2. Make more than one match at a time

Though Puzzle & Dragons is technically a match-3 game, it’s much more free-form than most, since you can move tokens anywhere on the board. That said, make sure you make more than a single match with every move to get your best bang for buck. This is done by keeping an eye on how tiles are swapped as you move yours; ensure the one you’re moving will be replaced by something that will make a match at the original location. With any luck, swaps you make on your path to the final spot will create more matches. Basically, you should be doing a combo every turn.

3. Log in regularly for rewards

You can easily stock up on magic stones simply by logging in regularly. Players earn rewards for logging in for consecutive and cumulative days. On your seventh consecutive log-in you’ll get 500 coins and 200 PAL points, and smaller rewards every day leading up to that. If you manage to log in 500 days total, you’ll get 15,000 coins, 1400 PAL points, and 83 magic stones all-told.

4. Save magic stones for GodFest

Though you may be eager to pop your magic stones into the rare egg machine for a new god as soon as possible, sit tight until a God Fest is happening. Odds of getting a really great egg increase a bunch during these events, which usually happen on weekends. Even though you’ll be raking in the stones early on, don’t spend them frivolously on stuff like endurance or retrying dungeons.

5. Get friendly

Identify high-level helpers that fit in with the elemental theme of your team and friend them. Stock up on friends, since you can only call on their help if they’ve logged in recently, and keep your friends list pruned of folks that haven’t been online in awhile. You'll also get PAL points whenever they use your hero, which can be spent on getting a few new monsters.

Your Puzzle & Dragons hints, tips, tricks, and cheats?

That really just scratches the surface of Puzzle & Dragons. It's a much deeper game than it lets on at first, but these hints should help you get on your way. Any experienced PAD players care to lend their advice in the comments?

2-Bit Cowboy is an absolutely charming platforming game with original Game Boy aesthetics and a plethora of fetch quests to enjoy. Crescent Moon Games showed us the ropes at GDC 2014, and it's easy to see how this game could become habit-forming. Players leap, swim, and dash their way through a monochromatic western paradise and pick up odd jobs. These can range from shooting scorpions to gathering coins to polishing off ne'er-do-well bandits. It eventually gets to the point where very nearly every object you interact with is a part of a mission.

The platforming action seems really well polished, and there are certain undeniably cute parts about 2-Bit Cowboy. I mean, how often are you going to get to wall-jump with a bull? 2-Bit Cowboy is coming out around April for about $1.99.

One of the less conventional games we saw at GDC 2014 was The Deer God from Crescent Moon Games. In it you lead a poor life as a hunter, and as the laws of karma dictate, you're zapped into the body of a deer until you find a way to appease the dreaded and mysterious Deer God. The game is fairly bare-bones for now, so the gameplay itself is little more than exploratory platforming, but the graphics style is fantastic. It takes the harsh pixellation of Sword & Sworcery and adds conversely modern 3D models and foregrounds.

I gotta say, mating with a doe and respawning as its offsring is one of the most interesting save point mechanics I've seen, well, ever. Keep an eye out for The Deer God on iOS when it launches sometime at the end of the year. No word on pricing yet.

Gear Jack: Black Hole is an upcoming endless runner we got to check out at GDC 2014. In this Crescent Moon title, we take control of an adorable little robot and control his leaps so he doesn't get maimed by the various dangers peppered throughout the level. While the character is usually plowing onwards at breakneck speeds, you've got to make sure he slows things down and tiptoes when traversing the lairs of especially bad nasties.

Besides that, players can also shrink the hero down into a ball to fit into small areas, not unlike sci-fi heroine Samus. Along the way, players collect gears which can be spent on various character upgrades and power-ups. It's a cute little runner with enough new to keep things interesting. Keep an eye out for it when it launches in April for free.

The fine folks behind Whale Trail are making a decidedly different puzzle game, and we got to take a look at the Game Developer Conference. Ustwo's Monument Valley has players guide a hapless girl through a twisted maze of Escherian proportions. Optical illusions and impossible architecture are nothing new, but when put into mobile game where you can interact with things that straight-up can't physically exist, you're left with an entirely new sensation.

Besides the mind-bending puzzles, a lot of detail has been put into the game's visuals. One of the devs said that they wanted every screen to look good enough to print and put up on your wall, and from what I've seen, they've accomplished that goal.

Monument Valley is launching on iOS in two weeks for about $4, and coming to Android shortly thereafter. For a closer look at the game's minimal, polished visuals, check out their website.

Whether you're looking for a fun and responsive way to take photos or you'd like a different sort of game controller for your iPhone, Grip & Shoot can help. This polycarbonate case and grip lets you take aim and fire. What's more, it has an open Application Programming Interface (API) to enable third-party app developers to support it easily.

Blizzard’s first mobile game, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, soft-launched in Canada, Australia and New Zealand last night, after a full year of lead-up. This is a free-to-play live multiplayer card game based on the popular franchise. Even throughout the PC and Mac release, the graphics, animation, and interface all made it clear that this was a game built with mobile in mind. Hearthstone is already one of the most played games on Twitch, which should be an indication of how popular it will be on mobile.

Here’s the gist of the game: players pick one of nine heroes, each representing a popular World of Warcraft class, like Shaman, Hunter, Priest, or Warrior, and each with their own unique in-game ability. They get a 30-card deck full of creatures to summon and spells. After an opponent has been found in either casual or online ranked match, a coin is flipped to figure out who goes first. Whoever loses that toss gets an extra card, as well as the coin, which can be traded in for an extra point of mana for one turn. Mana is the currency players get every turn to spend on playing the cards in their hand. You only get one mana gem for your first turn, but get a new one every other turn.

Players then start taking turns attacking one another with spells and creatures in an attempt to reduce the other’s life score to 0. Creatures have their own attack and health value, as well as special qualities. Taunt, for example, forces all creature attacks to be directed at them before anything else. Stealth prevents a creature from being targeted by spells until it makes its first attack. Like Magic: The Gathering, creatures can’t attack the first turn they come into play, but unlike Magic, health scores are persistent; if a creature takes damage, it sticks once the turn’s over. This gives the owner a chance to heal it, but for the most part, you want to get opposing creatures put down as soon as possible. This often leads to tough decision-making when figuring out which of your creatures you’re willing to sacrifice in order to clear the opponent’s side. Also unlike Magic, attacks can be directed at specific creatures.

You can get new cards in a couple of ways. Every class has 20 basic cards that you can unlock simply by levelling up that class through the practice mode. As you level up beyond 10, you earn packs of expert cards, which have a mix of class-specific cards or globally available cards, each with differing qualities of rarity. After building up a stockpile, you can build a custom deck with the cards available in your collection. A nice addition here is the crafting system.

If you’re really gunning to get a specific card, and have a bunch that you don’t like or aren’t using, you can disenchant them. The resulting dust can be spent on crafting cards you really want. Of course, you’re never quite getting an even trade when disenchanting; you’ll get at most a quarter of the creation cost of a card when dusting it, but that’s the price you pay. I’ve actually had a great time on the PC version with this by burning all of my non-hunter cards so my hunter deck could be absolutely great. You can also buy packs of cards with gold coins, which you earn for completing quests, such as earn three victories as a rogue, or summon 50 creatures with a power less than 3. You can also buy packs of cards outright through in-app purchases. Finally, you can try your hand at the Arena.

The Arena is the competitive section of Hearthstone. You pay an entry fee in gold or in-app purchase. You’re provided with a random deck and are pitted against another Arena opponent online. If you win, you get cards for your deck, and move on to the next wave. If you lose, you get your exit prize in card packs, varying in quality depending on how long you go undefeated.

The biggest downside here is the requirement for always-on connectivity. For one, asynchronous gameplay is much more popular for mobile, since being able to dedicate 15 minutes to a live game isn’t always viable. Seeing as games rarely go more than ten turns, it would be great to be able to queue up multiple matches, and simply get notifications when my opponent has played and it’s my turn. The current timer mechanic could even stay in place. In its current soft launch state, you can’t play practice games against the AI offline, either. Even if you just accidentally tap your lock button mid-game, you’ve got to restart.

Besides that, Hearthstone is promising to be one of the major iOS game releases of the year. It’s doing freemium in a balanced way, wherein you get something that feels permanent from your in-app purchases, and even if you don’t want to spend a cent, the game is actually completely viable. The graphics are vibrant, interactive, and touch-friendly. The gameplay is both accessible and deep. If you’re in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, be sure to download below and give this game a shot. Everybody else, sit tight — this game is worth the wait.

• Free - Download Now

Hey futbol fans! A free-to-play game featuring the legendary Pele just landed. You can control him through a lengthy career mode which takes you from humble beginnings to worldwide championships. The core gameplay is simply goal-kicking, using intuitive gesture controls similar to Flick Soccer, but over time you can unlock a bunch of items to customize your player. Every 20 minutes there’s an online leaderboard competition to win stuff. The real kicker here is that you can win real world items from playing, including jerseys, signed balls, or even a trip to Brazil.

For those unfamiliar, Pele, born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, is a pretty big deal in the world of football. Take a flip through his Wikipedia article to get a sense of his impact on the world’s most popular sport.

• Free, IAPs - Download Now