Tag: Clickgamer »

For those still wanting to indulge their inner desires for more mobile driver's education, Parking Mania has a treat for you! Almost five years after the title's original release, the game has finally made the jump to version 2.0!

Talk about adding value; the newest update includes an additional 45 levels. This brings the game to a grand total of 175 stages of vehicular navigating madness. But that's not all! This update revamps many other aspects of the game including the visuals, some of the core mechanics, and the inclusion of a leaderboard system that links up with your Facebook friends list.

Parking Mania is available now as an iPhone-focused app for $0.99.

It may be a new year, but Chillingo isn't forgetting about their previous releases, as they have announced an update for one of their games, and a new free version for another.

Parking Mania now has free versions for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. These are full versions of Parking Mania, where the goal is to park cars in tricky and tight spaces. Parking Mania Free features ads that can be removed, purchasable level packs, and a golden car that will allow players to not fail when they reach their last life. However, even with all these purchasable items, the game still comes with 60 levels of intense parking action! It's more fun than actual parking is.

The world's favorite game involving tossing ninjas throwing shurikens at targets, Ninja Throw, has been updated with a new level pack, Master of the Dojo, containing 15 new levels. The game is also on sale for $0.99 for both the iPhone/iPod touch version, and universal iPad version. I'm no genius, but the latter sounds like the smart money option.

2011 is still young, and already a theme of controversy appears to be consistently popping up, that being trademark issues. Following the Lima Sky/Doodle trademark controversy, it appears the next big controversy could be over apps with the word 'Stick' in the title. As independently confirmed by a developer with an affected title and reported elsewhere, UK game developer Stick Sports Ltd. is trying to get Apple to take down any apps that they claim violate their trademark, or have the apps be renamed to something non-infringing, as according to a PDF posted by a source who wishes to remain anonymous. While they are new to the App Store with their game Stick Cricket, they have been around since 2006 making Flash games, and have an Alexa rank of of 9,877, so this is not some small-time trademark troll.

While trademark law is very tricky to understand, especially for non-lawyers like myself, the rub in this case is that Stick Sports does not appear to have a US trademark on the name, but they do have a trademark in the UK on the name, which they are appearing to enforce. They have issued a takedown notice to Apple, sent to us by a developer who has an app that Stick Sports claims violates their trademark. An identical copy of this notice was also obtained by another site that covers iOS apps. This notice from Stick Sports' law firm was forwarded to developers of potentially infringing apps. Developers cannot change names of their apps based on specific regions, though they can offer apps to only go on sale in specific regions, you cannot rename a title for a specific region, as according to a developer I once spoke to on The Portable Podcast who had issues with a German trademark over the word 'memory'.

This takedown notice from Stick Sports could have some far-reaching effects. Notable apps that could be affected if they were part of the takedown notice include Stick Sports: Summer Games from Robert Szeleney, who has had multiple top 25 apps on the App Store, several of which have the word 'stick' in their name. As well, there is Stick-Fu from EA subsidiary Chillingo's Clickgamer label. EA is not a stranger to trademark fights, having helped to get Tim Langdell's Edge trademark invalidated last year, so if EA got involved in a legal fight, this story could become interesting. Otherwise, we could see some titles disappear from the App Store or become renamed in the near future as this issue progresses. This story is still developing, and it will be curious to see where it goes and how the potentially affected parties react.

Where is the summer going? My apologies for last week's lack of a Friday Five. We're back this week, though, with five interesting apps from the past week, just like always. Enjoy!

Hellsing's Fire
Hellsing's Fire is a beautifully illustrated puzzle-adventure game from Clickgamer (Angry Birds, anyone?). Dr. Hellsing's illuminating torch and his assistant Raffton's tonics are both necessary to defeat the undead hordes. The puzzles are trumpeted as being "quick but rewarding"...sounds great for pick-up-and-play or, you know, losing hours of your life. With 90 monster-packed levels, Crystal integration for leaderboards and achievements, and wry dialogue, Hellsing's Fire looks to be a great new App Store game.

Audible
Audible.com is one of the biggest audiobook sites on the web. Subscribers to the website enjoy a market of digital audiobooks that's hard to beat, and now with the Audible app, said users can download their Audible.com libraries to their iPhones. The Audible app runs in the background with iOS 4 on multitasking-enabled devices. It also support chapter navigation, Play as You Download, bookmarking, Button Free Mode, and Sleep Mode. It's a great app if you want to listen to your Audible.com audiobooks, but unfortunately this app doesn't yet allow you to buy them in-app.

Wheel of Fortune Platinum Edition
This app brings the famous TV game show to the iPhone...finally! Test your wordly wit against the app or with others via multiplayer mode. The wheel and the sound effects are true to the show, and the puzzles are written by the producers themselves. You can customize your characters, too. Multiplayer comes in the form of pass-and-play, local multiplayer (Bluetooth / WiFi), or network mode (yes! online multiplayer!). "Theme Weeks" featuring custom puzzles and wedges will be introduced, too. The app itself looks pretty good, though some players have apparently experienced crashing...so proceed with caution. As famous as Wheel of Fortune is, though, I'd expect a bug-fixing update soon.

Mapquest 4 Mobile
Remember when MaqQuest was practically the king of online mapping? It's no longer the undisputed champ, but MapQuest is still as solid a service as ever. MapQuest 4 Mobile finally brings it to the iOS platform, with awesome features such as turn-by-turn spoken directions, quick re-routing, backgrounding support on iOS 4, and even pedestrian directions. Best of all, however? It's free! It might not be brand-new, but the latest version of Mapquest 4 Mobile is such a step forward that I felt justified in including it here.

Fly Vs. Car
On the surface, Fly Vs. Car is simple. Playing as a small fly, you must tilt your iPhone to avoid being hit by oncoming traffic. Simple, simple, simple...even OpenFeint and Facebook / Twitter score posting can only add so much to such a basic premise. But what makes Fly Vs. Car unique is that the developers at Snow Day Games have pledged to donate half of all profits to Child's Play Charity, a not-for-profit group that donates toys and games to sick children. Now that's a mission we can get behind.

Three games from relatively recent reviews have all received robust updates of late. Forgive me if these aren't exactly "new," but if you passed on these games in the past due to concerns about content, take note: now's the time to try them again.

Angry Birds
Clickgamer's Angry Birds won my heart with its quirky style and cheerful, bizarre art. One feature that was notably absent from the birds-in-a-slingshot game, however, was online high scores. The 1.2 update remedied that with Crystal integration, which brings leaderboards and achievements. It also included 42 new levels for an already-great game.