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2014′s Best iPhone/ iPad Games Ever

by Nixon Lee (Technamize)

1. Hearthstone

Originated from PC, the long-waited game finally made it to the iPad. It is a turn-based card game based on World of Warcraft that compounds intense action and strategy. Surprisingly for a card game, you would love to “catch’em all” like Pokemon.
Not only campaign mission, you can fight your way through the online community or friends. You’ll just love the gameplay like all the beloved fans do! No doubt Hearthstone can get 148 five star rating in 2 days!

2. FTL (Faster Than Light)

Also made from the PC, Faster Than Light lets you experience the “star war” among the galaxy. Through it’s strategic game play, you control various types of spaceships and fight against rebels, aliens in real-time.
Although having 28 different ships, you don’t get them all in one play. Instead you progress through a randomly generated course and unlock ships when you get an achievement.
You could upgrade your weapons and horsepower from stores located in middle of nowhere to defend yourself. Sometimes you might get lucky and get free crew from distresses, or free fuels.
It may seem boring for a game, but it sure did spend me the last few days playing!

3. Clash of Clans

One of the multiplayer-based game with a huge community. Being the mayor of you clan, your goal is to build a base that is defensive and train troops to be offensive to other clans. There are five major elements in the game, trophies, gold, elixir, gems and dark elixir, which you can get on later stages.
This game mixes both strategic and action gameplay that makes you victorious each time you defended or attacked successfully. Without doubt you’ll love the game and last for at least 5 months playing non-stop!

4. Asphalt 8 : Airborne

Cars! Cars! Cars! Can you bear the heat? From the bottom of my heart, I truly think Asphalt is the best racing game on the iPad. Not only because of the graphics and addiction to the speed you can pick up, but also the feature that lets you crash other’s cars and do a 360!
Moreover, there are a wide range of cars from different classes, performing better jumps and boosts per upgrade. Oh also, although the game being free, don’t think it will try their every best to charge you money! It is a legitimate game!

5. Kingdom Rush Frontier

I must admit I played this game over and over again for 3 times. I have been a big fan of their Kingdom Rush series and they have definitely polished their second game to a more fun, more towers and for action game.
Given the fact that it is a tower defence game, you also get to experience real time actions, because there are troops to be managed against a storm of humongous giants and mythical creatures, I hope you’ll be a fan like me!

6. Shadow Fight 2

Fighting games are always addictive, but in this one, you get to use multiple weapons and cause mass combos of attack! Controls of this game made the whole gameplay enjoyable. I swear to god if there isn’t the energy bar, which it minus one when you go to fight, I will play this game until my battery drains!
Although you can only see the character as a shadow, the animations and graphics are surprisingly amazing! You also get to buy chestplates, helmets, upgrade and add enhancements to your gears! Not to forget, after hours and hours of playing, I just realised there are more than one page of levels, which each pages has like 50 plays! Truly astonishing!

7. Rollercoaster Rush

One of the best classic games, I wanted to add this in the list because it is so old that some of you mightn’t know. It is a fun arcade which you control an insane rollercoaster to do crazy flips. And your aim is to bring it to the end with the fastest speed for high scores.
I don’t know whether it is because we love destruction so much, there at multiple ways to crash your cart and it is very fun to watch. This is a very casual game, so I am sure fund yourself something to Do when you are bored!

8. Ice Rage

Another arcade for leisure, as It describes itself, the most intense single-devices multiplayer game! The special feature about this games to have tons and tons of characters to play or play against with. You can also have a split screen and fight your friends on the same device!
Moreover, the fun part is you have different gamemodes, including the most fun deathmatch which you fight your friends till yourdead! And also the tournament which you progress through a competition and upgrade your abilities including strength, skills and speed each time you won. Definitely a great game to play.

9. Captain America : The Winter Solider

Love the movie, love the game! You can definitely find an action packed game as you play as the amazing Captain America and partner with self-chose agents to fight baddies same in the movie!
You might be also interested in what you can do besides beating the enemies up, there are quick mini games like lottery and arenas but it is not that fun. The fun part is you get to win materials and gold from those game and you can upgrade your gadgets, suits or gears. Oh I also forgot to mention, there are more than five suits to unlock!

10. Fieldrunner 2

A stressful (for me) but addictive game. Of course not like Flappy Bird, you have to be very strategical in this game. However, as much as the thinkings, you’ll be fond of the killings you’ll get. Each time you fail a level, you’ll just say, “No! Give me one more try!” Then you just can’t stop!
The new Fieldrunner also offers up a lot of new weapons and items and you can purchase them from gold you’ve gain in battles. Moreover, troops looks similar to previous ones, but guns are technically more awesome as you can blast someone off the battlefield, hopefully you could be smarter than me so you won’t have a stressful gameplay!

11. Bow Master

Besides the gibberish that there is only two maps to play with and you need to purchase each new maps for ridiculous amount of money, it is a very cool game! You get to control a realistic bow with two fingers and shoot target boards that are moving. And simultaneously, you’ll have to fight against two better bow masters by getting points.
If the game has more free feature, you’ll experience better bows, more challenging maps and harder targets! The graphics itself is already enjoyable , so I’m sure the gameplay will be too! Thus, love the graphics, love the shooting!

Hope these games can serve up your whole 2014! If there are new awesome games, please write it down below! Insure will update this post! Happy Gaming!

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Dragon Age: Inquisition hands-on: fine fantasy

Dragon Age: Inquisition poster (dragonage.wikia.com)

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Dragon Age: Inquisition hands-on: fine fantasy

By Evan Lahti (PCGamer)

Inquisition takes inspiration from both Origins and DA2.

You might have seen images of maps online, on Reddit or elsewhere, where cartographically-skilled gamers have compared the sizes of The Largest Worlds in Gaming. Tamriel is sized up against Liberty City, Chernarus against Far Cry 3. Just Cause 2’s island is overlaid atop The Lord of the Rings Online (a ridiculous 30,000 square miles, allegedly).

World size has always struck me as a meaningless measuring stick. For RPGs, doubly so. When I talk to someone about Skyrim, I don’t gush about the virtual land area I’ve experienced. I tell them that they can be a cat person and steal the silverware of whomever they please, or replace the mammoths with giant, exploding chickens.

Distance isn’t intrinsically fun; if a game’s massive space isn’t populated purposefully, its promised ‘epic journey’ can be pretty dull. I say all this to explain why I was unmoved by the marketing line BioWare began using around E3 for Dragon Age: Inquisition. This was the “biggest game in the studio’s history,” we heard in every interview. In a presentation for the game, one slide replicated exactly the style of map I mentioned, overlaying Inquisition’s zones atop the Skyrim map to demonstrate that BioWare’s world was biggest.

Surely there was much more to Inquisition than scale, I hoped. BioWare, after all, has some convincing to do after Dragon Age 2, the sequel that mainstreamed some of Origins’ old-school intricacies for the sake of a more controller-friendly template.

To see for myself, I spent a full day playing Inquisition, and hours in conversation with BioWare at its studio in Edmonton. I left Canada more than reassured about the game’s direction, with any worries that Inquisition was simply a ‘Skyrimification’ of an RPG I liked a lot fully assuaged.

Showing, not telling

If anything, it’s the absurd variety of Inquisition’s biomes, not the dimensions of its open world, that makes the setting compelling. Yes, BioWare has built an awfully large house for you to raise a loving RPG family in, but more importantly it’s furnished the hell out of it. Let’s take inventory: Inquisition gives you a handsome, customizable castle-base, within which you craft weapons, chat up companions, and manage your organization. DA2’s dusty engine has been swapped for Frostbite, the same tech that drives the Battlefield series. Your player-character can be male, female, one of four confirmed races, and speak with an American or British accent. There are nine potential companions, but despite the effort they took to design, voice, and write, you can skip meeting or recruiting most of them entirely, and they can be dismissed at any time. Inquisition’s combat system finally gives equal favor to its real-time and pausable approaches to fighting. There’s the cooperative multiplayer mode, independent from the single-player story. And there are dragons: dragons that take ten or more solid minutes to kill, dragons with individually-damageable legs.

It’s a kitchen-sink approach to RPG design in some ways, but the relationships between these features are encouraging, especially in how they support your role as an Inquisitor within the metagame. It isn’t scale for scale’s sake, from what I’ve played. When I ask BioWare what’s interesting about its biggest RPG ever beyond being a useful marketing line, executive producer Mark Darrah brings up something he calls “intrinsic storytelling.”

“Big levels obviously can’t narrate themselves; that’s impossible. The scope of that is too big. They need to give the player opportunities to tell their own stories and ultimately that’s what comes from exploring this open-world gameplay.” I get a feel for what Darrah’s talking about in an area called the Dales Highlands, a zone that ends up being my favorite in Inquisition. The intro to the Dales is incredibly light. An arcane, malicious blizzard has grasped the area’s rough, typically-thawed cliffs, icing the river that nearby Sarhnia depends on for food and trade. What I notice throughout this area, and appreciate, is the lack of heavy-handed exposition about who, what, where, and why: the theme of the Highlands, as I discover simply by fighting through it, is driving out an invader and advancing the frontline.

The Red Templars (a faction of rebel, overzealous Templars) are to blame for the magic winter, and I see their signature pocking the cliffs as I climb: red lyrium. This potent, dangerous anti-magic substance is the source of the corruption that’s tainted these Templars, and huge crystalline shards of it are piercing the Highlands. I cleave and shield-bash through a fourth pack of the misguided knights in an ice tunnel; the whole screen is a glow of blue light filtered through pristine ice and unnatural, saturated red emanating from the lyrium. These colors tell the story as well as any dialogue.

Further up, I fight a Red Templar Behemoth, less a soldier and more a 15-foot-tall, faceless lump of bipedal lyrium. For the first time I have to toggle-on Dragon Age’s tactical camera, renovated for Inquisition, to kite the monster and deliberately spend my party’s abilities. It’s here that I realize how comfortable Inquisition feels when played as a real-time action-RPG; even more than it did in DA2. Broadly, the combat isn’t as demanding as a conventional action game—there’s auto-attack—but it also never drifts into, say, over-generous hit detection or the disconnected ‘combat dancing’ of some MMOs.

“We’re going for a hybrid of Origins and Dragon Age 2 stuff,” Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw says of the combat. “We want the responsiveness of DA2, that’s a biggie, but the influences of Origins are undeniable. We did want to find that balance.” Although I played Inquisition on PC, unfortunately I wasn’t able to do so on a mouse and keyboard. Still, it was strangely reassuring how well the tactical approach to combat handled on a controller, of all things. Plotting commands was simple, clean, and helped by an interface that mostly mirrors what we had in Origins. Unlike that game, though, Inquisition uses highlights and color to make that visual information more interesting and readable. The camera behaved well throughout. Automated AI settings are preserved, too, like how much mana a mage should keep in reserve, or at what HP threshold a character should down a potion.

After I clear the Red Templars from the first part of the Highlands, a floating context cue invites me to build an Inquisition camp. The screen fades out and in, revealing new tents and rudimentary defenses. A few Inquisition scouts mingle. I can replenish my potions, and the camp is a fast travel point. I earn power, a resource I can spend to complete operations, the main course of Inquisition’s metagame. And a blocked gate is cleared, granting access to another part of the Highlands.

That feeling of not knowing what’s around the next corner is new in Dragon Age, and it beats the hell out of backtracking through the mostly-homogenous cityscape of Kirkwall in Dragon Age 2, which was rightly criticized for reusing some level assets. By the end of the demo, I’ve seen a spectrum of biomes. I wade through the Ferelden Bogs, an inky undead swamp that could’ve been borrowed from Resident Evil or Diablo. I close Fade Rifts on the Exalted Plains, which resemble Norway on steroids, the wooden bones of abandoned forts punctuating its rolling grassland. I first tiptoe, then blast, my way through the Still Ruins, a crumbling temple where demons are frozen in stasis alongside Venatori cultists… until I retrieve a staff at the end of the level and have to fight my way back through these reanimated mobs.

Back in the Highlands, there’s another bit of that intrinsic storytelling woven into the environment, although I don’t pick up on it initially. A stone bridge called Judicael’s Crossing is snapped in half. I tap a key to mark the busted infrastructure as an operation point for my Inquisition, then fast-travel back to Skyhold, my castle, and Inquisition’s answer to the Normandy in Mass Effect. It’s detailed, cavernous, but more importantly, there’s more stuff you can do in Skyhold than on Commander Shepard’s ship. Past the tavern, stables, courtyard, kitchen, and dungeon (for imprisoning people, not slaying rats, I learn), I step to the War Table. Here, a dozen or so operation markers populate a world map: scouting missions, a task to gain the friendship of the dwarven kingdom of Orzammar or to recruit an arcanist. You complete these micro-quests entirely through the menu, and they grant modest benefits: gold, loot, resources, or adding more ‘agents’ who join the Inquisition. But some, like addressing the Chantry in Val Royeux, are tied to the main plot.

I spend some of the power I accumulated in the Highlands to rebuild the bridge. Some operations, like this one, are instantly resolved, but others ask you to pick which of your three advisors—Josephine (political), Cullen (military), or Leliana (spying)—is the right fit for the job, making them temporarily unavailable. You can visit with all three of these support characters inside Skyhold.

Also nestled into the War Table (but separated from operations) are Inquisition perks, which draw on influence that you gain from exploring Thedas and completing quests. (If power is “Inquisition gold,” as Darrah puts it, influence is Inquisition XP, effectively.) There are four perk types: Forces, Secrets, Connections, and simply ‘Inquisition’, the first three of which are tied to those previously mentioned advisors. A Forces perk might increase your potion capacity by four; a Secrets perk might increase the XP you earn from picking up codex entries; one Connections perk grants better merchant offers on rare items. Skyhold changes as a reflection of which perks you favor, although I wasn’t told how. It probably won’t take the form of decor, considering part of playing Inquisitor means decorating Skyhold manually: everything from the windows, throne, banner, and heraldry to the drapes can be swapped in a menu.

The piece of Skyhold I’m most curious about, though, is the one that was only described to me. As the Inquisitor, BioWare tells me, you’ll pass judgment on NPCs who come to Skyhold, characters who typically act as echoes of events in the main storyline. After you rescue Inquisition soldiers from the Ferelden Bog, for example, the offspring of the barbarian leader you kill arrives at the Skyhold front gate, knocking a dead goat against your walls. It’s a ritual insult for killing his kin, but you have to decide whether to give this barbarian and his followers weapons and exile them, put him in a stockade, or take a different action.

BioWare sees these judgment sequences as a way of getting players to reflect further on their decisions. “They’re an opportunity to ask the player, ‘OK, you finished this, you saved the orphanage—how do you feel about that? Why did you do that? It’s essentially getting a little bit of motivation from the player because you’re asking them to make a subsequent follow-up decision. And often story doesn’t do that, it just says, ‘OK, you saved the orphanage, hooray!’”

Laidlaw underlines the value on getting players to look backward rather than simply anticipating the next quest. “Inquisition, moreso than many of our other games, takes a moment to just ask ‘how you feeling?’ and have characters dig into why you did what you did. And to try to understand the Inquisitor’s mind. And they’re some of my favorite moments in the game,” he says.

Back in the Highlands, I cross that bridge I fixed to explore the new area it’s opened up. Before I’ve fully stepped across, two dragons are in the air above me. They won’t attack—dragon encounters aren’t dynamic events in Inquisition—but a few minutes and a few more dispatched Red Templars later, I stumble into a den. I’d thought the sky-lizards were just set dressing and spectacle, but they were telegraphing the threat ahead. “Oh look, a dragon. What a perfect way to ruin our day,” my mage, Dorian, quips.

Beginning’s end

I like how Inquisition trusts I’ll find my own way. It’s not a do-anything, kill-anyone sandbox game, nor should it be, but it’s encouraging that it seems to be keeping its spirit as a dialogue- and party-driven game intact while embracing the scale the new engine enables. And it’s fitting that the end of the main quest won’t be the end of your save file—you’ll be able to keep playing. That makes sense in an open-world structure, but could it undermine the finality of the ending? I ask Darrah to explain BioWare’s approach.

“Often in storytelling you would put a nice bow around everything and then everyone opens up a hotel on the beach and drinks Mai Tais, and you can’t do that—you need to leave the world in a relatively unstable state but bring enough resolution so that the story has a satisfying conclusion.”

The end isn’t the end, and in a different way, that’s one of the most exciting things for me about Inquisition: this four-year investment to reset and broaden Dragon Age can’t be a one-off. By the end of our conversation, Darrah admits that “it’s fair to say that we have had some thoughts to the future.” If Inquisition is truly the foundation for more Dragon Age, we’ll have a lot to enjoy from BioWare’s fantasy team in the years ahead.

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PC Gamer UK October issue: Evolve

By Phil Savage (PCGamer)

Release the Kraken! Hunt the Kraken! Stop the Kraken! Panic at the Kraken! These and other Kraken-based activities are at the centre of Evolve, Turtle Rock’s 4-vs-1 multiplayer shooter. We sent the monstrous Ben Griffin to take a look at the game, and he came back, not only with a hands-on report on the Left 4 Dead successor, but also bathed in the blood of multiple games journalists. We didn’t ask questions.

Also, this issue, exclusive gifts. We’re giving away a free starter kit for Might & Magic: Duel of Champions, and a Crimson Portal effect for Path of Exile. The issue, which is in shops now, can be ordered through My Favourite Magazines. Digitally, you’ll find it on the App Store, Google Play, and Zinio, and you can subscribe to get issues delivered directly to your door. Read on for a look at the subs cover, and a round-up of the features to be found in issue 270.

This month we…

• Go claws-on with Evolve
• Get hunted in Alien: Isolation
• Talk to Cliffy B about his new arena shooter
• Preview Heroes of the Storm, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Path of Exile: Forsaken Masters, The Witcher Adventure Game, Riot, The Crew, Survarium, The Long Dark and Wasteland 2
• Review Firefall, Risen 3, The Wolf Among Us: Season 1, OlliOlli, Gods Will Be Watching, Magic: The Gathering 2015, Abyss Odyssey, Lovely Planet, Warface, Light, Shattered Planet, Metro 2033 Redux, Metro: Last Light Redux, Halfway, War Thunder, Sacred 3, Unrest
• Supertest the latest high-performance SSDs
• Learn how to lose successfully in Now Playing
• Explore Guild Wars 2′s second season in Update
• Make the case for LA Noire in Reinstall

…And more.

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VIDEO: Ebola Has Crossed into Senegal: 5 countries total

More that 1,500 dead, and millions more afraid. The stakes are high for Senegal to contain the virus. (GuardianTV.com)

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Associated Press reported that Ebola crossed the border into Senegal Making it the fifthWest African country to be infiltrated by the virus, along with Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria.

A university student infected got infected in Guinea before seeking treatment in the country’s capital, Dakar. 

Senegal shares a border with Guinea, where the outbreak began last year. In March, Senegal closed the border to prevent the overspill of Ebola. The virus has killed more than 1,500 people so far.

An experimental vaccine to prevent the Ebola virus will be injected into a human test panel, the National Institute of Health announced August 28.

On Tuesday, September 2, researchers will test 20 healthy adult volunteers with a vaccine developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and GlaxoSmithKline.

More than 500 new cases of Ebola were reported last week — the highest since the beginning of the outbreak last year.

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