Black Citadel II for I-Play

October 5th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Games | No Comments »

I-Play launched the Black Citadel II from French developer Kaolink. The game is well known in the industry for it’s CTIA nomination back in 2004 where it got a lot of attention for it’s gameplay and graphics.

David Gosen, CEO of I-Play, commented: “Black Citadel II is easy to play yet totally addictive

Gameloft’s Q4 lineup

October 3rd, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Games | No Comments »

Gameloft will bring the following titles to the market in Q4; Miami Nights: Singles In The City, Dogz, Brain Challenge, Naval Battle, Deal or no Deal (UK) (previously released by Overloaded), Asphalt 3, Christmas Midnight Pool, Bubble Bash, King Kong Pinball, Gangstar: Crime City, Real Golf 2007, Special Crime Unit, Real Tennis 2007, Rayman Raving Rabbits, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Horse Riding Academy, Meteos and Dominos Fever (working title).

Looking at the list, we are sure to see a lot of safe bets as Gameloft pulls out a lot of licenses which performed well before. Also we see Gameloft is going to catch the ride of brain training, doggy and naval board games. We wonder if they are still in time though with every big (and a lot of smaller) publishers already having their titles out there. Needless to say though, the overall expectations are really high yet again.

The Sims hits the one million mark

September 22nd, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Games | No Comments »

EA Mobile announced their Sims game reached 1 million sold units in about 7 months time. Looking at the distribution of EA, which is still mainly US focused (and at the tier 1 EU channels), there is even much more potential for the game.

Namco’s iPod games

September 20th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Games | 2 Comments »

In advance to our open discussion tomorrow, QB published an interview with Namco’s Scott Rubin. The interview is mainly focused at Pac-Man’s debut on the iPod, however QB also put online a series of iPod game reviews at the same time.

Nokia and EA team up

September 13th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Games | No Comments »

Our friends at QB announced the new collaboration plans of EA and Nokia. EA will make it’s games portfolio available over the Nokia Content Discovery tool and over the new games platform Nokia will launch mid 2007. The games on the last mentioned platform will be specially designed for the Nokia handsets. For more details, please read the post over at QB.

O2 and Puzzler to deliver cheap puzzle games

August 4th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Games | 1 Comment »

O2 and Puzzler have agreed to set up a dedicated portal to service UK clients with the most popular puzzle formats available like SuDuKo, KaKuRo and crosswords. The dedicated channel will also allow people to form puzzle groups and compete for prizes. Playing puzzles will cost 50p a time. Currently there are 1.000 puzzles available online and new ones will be added on a daily basis. "With [Puzzler Media’s] expert help we have broadened our popular mobile entertainment services to include a fun and intriguing selection of mobile puzzles that should speak to a wide audience amongst O2’s 16m customers." Said Anthony Douglas, head of games at )2 UK. "The Puzzler Portal on O2 Active is the new go-to destination for mobile puzzles — the puzzles are fun, easy to access and play, and provide hours of entertainment." Said Neil O’Brien, Business developer at Puzzler Media. Puzzler Media currently is publishing more then 50 titles.

The pressrelease didn’t mention if the puzzle games are regular games or wap games. Something that would be interesting to know in their pricelevel.

Ten tips for developers

August 1st, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Games | No Comments »

Businessweek posted an interview with Pocket Gamer on what to do to create a great game. The interview is loaded with good examples and really shows the care and attention needed to create a good point of reference to developers. They also tag down many heard complaint from consumers I experienced myself like unclear interfaces and non-nutritive buttons. We can only conclude this post is a must read.

Telcogames to follow the IQ training games wave

July 28th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Games | No Comments »

Telcogames sent out a press release about their latest title to go into global distribution coming September. Though they claim their game ‘mobile IQ trainer’ will be the first, we found out that other developers had already done it. One of those examples would be Brain Juice from Digital Chocolate. Nevertheless, their announcement sounds really interesting as this game also holds many mini-games like puzzles, algebra challenges, spatial thinking tasks and much more. What makes this pressrelease more interesting to us though is the announcement from Telcogames that they plan to release the game also on DS and PSP. We know the DS seems to be pretty simple to port to and that Gameloft has done some DS titles as well. However will Nintendo allow that much competition to their own titles? Anyway it’s interesting to see which way they will move.

Codemasters goes Brew

July 25th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Games | No Comments »

After a successfull start in J2me, Codemasters has now signed up with Qualcomm to go Brew. Titles in the Brew roadmap will be Colin McRae Rally and TOCA amongst many others.

Kosei Ito about Final Fantasy Mobile

June 20th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Games | No Comments »

Gamasutra published an interesting interview with Kosei Ito about upcoming Square Enix titles that will hit the market later this year. The interview’s focus is on the U.S. market, but we hope these titles will also come available in the EU.