CATEGORY: iOS

The new game from the Monkeybin team is a move away from dexterity and hand to eye co-ordination and towards getting your brain into gear!

With the recent release of MindFeud – Monkeybin’s social board game for mobile iOS and Android devices – we thought we’d take a look at the whole genre of social gaming to see what’s happening.

Cloned app scandals, Chinese app allegations, rumours about the iPad 3 – just another week of Apple bites that have been causing some “noise” in the media; we round up the top stories for you below.

The folks at Monkeybin have been very busy chimps over the past months; you may have seen some of the things that have been going on round here with the release of a new app or two and the pending release of a couple more…but this week we all breathed a huge sigh of relief when our “baby” finally got the release it deserved. It’s taken blood, sweat, tears and not a small amount of time but we’re proud to announce the release of Jumpship Thrust Control 2 – now available in the App store.

You can’t really have a great mobile game without great mobile graphics, though the old fans of Tetris may disagree! As mobile gaming continues to boom, the demand for more sophisticated graphics for mobile devices also advances; it presents many challenges because of the obvious size, memory, processor power and battery restrictions of the mobile devices like smart phones and tablets; we take a look at that below.

OK, it’s been a tough week and we’ve had enough of the serious talk, so we thought we’d have a bit of fun and take a look at the craziest smartphone apps around. We introduce the 10 maddest apps for iPhones and Androids to you below – in no particular order.

Such is the glamorous life of app and game developers that we used to have to spend ages playing around with Photoshop, resizing and reformatting images to create the right icons to include in iPads, iPhones and Android-based apps and games. It‘s at times like that you sometimes wonder about getting a real job :-) No more! The Iconimator application does it all for you in a flash.

Mobile apps and gaming have become vehicles not only for people to get a more enjoyable, entertaining and informative experience from their handsets, but also for companies to market their products and services to their audiences.

Mobile gaming has certainly become big business, with sales reaching $5.6 billion last year, but the question remains whether mobile game marketing represents a good return on investment for companies developing games in the hope of increasing sales.

Here we look at a few positive examples that may help us answer that question.

With the release of the iPhone 4S, which we reviewed for you a couple of weeks ago, we are starting to wonder whether mobile gaming is going back to the future.

The upcoming release of the latest iPhone and the expected impact it is going to have on its users – turning more and more unsuspecting, innocent phone/camera/chat users into mobile gamers – is occupying a lot of blog post inches.

Here we ask whether we are seeing an effect not seen since the 1990s, when mobile gaming devices burst on to the market?

We might be silent from time to time, but that is just a sign that we are hard at work. And I thought now was a good time to share a little something about a title we're working on. It's not our main focus and you could call it a spare time game, if we had any of that! Keep on reading to learn more about the featured critters, and also get a glimps of some of the awesome artwork.

We were dead tired of resizing images in Photoshop, and decided to write a little Ruby Magick to do the dirty job for us. But then we thought "Hey! This is useful for all iOS designers and developers out there, let's create a public service instead". And so be it. Today, we are proud to present to you the all new, shiny icon resizing service - Iconimator.

We love games that are full of action and frantic gameplay. This is another one of those. We have planned to include both multiplayer and singleplayer modes. That calls for coding some AI, and we are so looking forward to see how smart we can get those machine controlled players.