Tag: Fire Sale »

It feels like it wasn’t all that long ago when Samurai Bloodshow (the rest of the title is too confusing so I’m leaving it off) managed to take me completely by surprise. The combination of strategy, card collecting, and over-the-top arterial spray brought a huge smile to my face. And now Sega is poised to do the same thing to me all over again. Albeit without the surprise since I know what’s coming this time around.

Alexandria Bloodshow is the official sequel to that other fantastic genre mash-up. This time players can take control of two separate armies – the Egyptians and the Greeks – as they attempt to collect, cut-up, and conquer. With the requisite art styles (Greek pottery, Egyptian hieroglyphics) to match of course. All the engrossing card gathering and deck building is still on offer, now with a whole new set of units to strategize with. Over 120 in all, actually. And with the two selectable armies, five difficulties, and seventeen stages it makes for a total of 170 campaign levels to conquer. And that’s not even taking the two player versus mode (via WiFi or Bluetooth) into account.

Alexandria Bloodshow is available on the App Store now, and it’s only $0.99. Okay, it's actually free to download but it's $0.99 to unlock the full game. Not a bad deal.

It's amazing how certain iOS games can just explode into our culture, isn't it? It happened with Angry Birds, which spawned more than a few spin-offs, merchandise and even a cartoon. The sadistic little app from Bolt Creative about the lovably doomed island of pygmies has also been bitten by the success bug. Since its release, Pocket God has seen a ton of content updates, a follow-up with its own metric ton of additions, and a digital comic. Each of these three things have been incredibly popular, but it's the success of the comic we're talking about now.

On the heels of a major milestone achievement (500 thousand plus downloads) and a new update (issue #11) comes even better news. Pocket God Comics, in collaboration with Free App A Day (FAAD), is on sale for absolutely free for the next two days. Well technically FAAD is responsible for Thursday's sale, while MonsterFreeApps is handling Friday. Anyway, from the 8th through the 9th, the now 11 issue strong digital comic app will be available for zilch. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

Great games, great reads, great regular prices and an even greater sale. Honestly, aside from a general discomfort derived from the violent demises of cartoon islanders, I can't think of a legitimate reason for anyone to miss this sale. It's looking to be one fantastic weekend.

Tower defense fans rejoice! Origin8, makers of the rather popular and critically acclaimed Sentinel 3: Homeworld have seen fit to drop the price for a limited time. Okay, it wasn't entirely their doing but rather Openfeint's FireSale promotion. Although technically it was the thousand Openfeint gamers who voted for the price drop, I suppose.

Regardless, Sentinel 3: Homeworld is temporarily marked down to a dollar. That's right, for an indeterminate about of time it's possible to get a hold of one of the App Store's most celebrated tower defense titles for next to nothing. Even better, as special "Thank You" for all the love, Origin8 has also temporarily dropped the price of the Campaign 2 DLC. So that's another dollar. Just in case anyone was wondering, that's $5 worth of some of the most highly regarded TD goodness for a mere $2.

I'm sure there are a fair number of people reading this who already own the game, but I also imagine a fair number of them have yet to get the DLC. No time like the present, right? And everyone else who loves tower defense games but still doesn't own it, wave those lame excuses bye-bye.

OpenFeint has just announced its newest iOS venture, Game Channel. The new service promises to offer lots of great features, including a free game of the day spotlight that will help users discover great free apps they might have otherwise missed. The main draw of Game Channel though is going to be Fire Sale, a new service which is taking the Groupon model of group sales and bringing it to iOS.

According to OpenFeint, Fire Sale will present a premium app that is going on sale every week. Much like Groupon, users who are interested in buying the game at a discounted price can vote, and when enough votes are reached the price will drop. Fire Sale will then send out a push notification to everyone who voted on the app, letting them know the title is available at a discount. The first game going on sale is Jaws from Bytemark Games, and users can start voting on the title on December 17 at 12:01 am PST.

“We have a motivated community that has proven time and again that they’ll come back for great deals. This happens every day with Free Game of the Day,” says Jason Citron, CEO of OpenFeint. “Fire Sale is a truly social, community-based promotion, that is a perfect way for game developers to get their games downloaded.”

So how well will this new feature go over? That largely depends on the quality of apps offered and how deep the discounts go. For instance, Jaws is currently available for $2.99 and will drop to $0.99, is that good enough for consumers? Of course, the price can't go much lower than that so the quality of the game will likely play a major factor in many potential buyers' decisions.

We'll also have to keep an eye out on which publishers opt to support the program, as that will be a big determining factor. If OpenFeint can convince major players like Chillingo/EA, Namco and Gameloft to come aboard then things should go very well, but if the big companies decide to sit this one out then the appeal of Fire Sale may be quite limited. In any case, it will be very interesting to see if this group sale model can catch on for iOS. Could it be possible that we're witnessing a revolution in digital distribution?