On app stores and the mobile market

I still haven't actually put a toe out there myself, but I read articles about those who do.

We Can't Make It Here Anymore

fuck you apple

If you ever needed proof that games are a valid medium, how about watching them getting censored for being political?

Carry on, nothing to see here! Please, keep buying your Clicky Tower and pay no attention to the beating behind the curtain....

tablet VNs

This came up on another forum but seemed sufficiently relevant to some interests that I thought I'd repost it.

While there are a number of games originally designed for the cellphone market and a few ports, the ports are often buggy, and there are few games really designed to work well on tablets. (Technically we have a tablet version of Magical Diary but only for a really obscure tablet that nobody has.)

For people wanting to play more visual novels on tablets, this was suggested:

While as discussed above there isn't much in the way of VN's for table devices ( besides an x86 win8 tablet )
I have discovered an alternate way of playing VN's on my Ipad. I use an app called Splashtop Streamer
( http://www.splashtop.com/splashtop2 ) Essentially it's a $5 remote access app for iOS, Android (and Mac and
PC I think) It allows you to access your computer and run programs on your Mac or PC from anywhere you have an internet connection. So far I haven't had much problem using it to stream VN's to my iPad, sometimes it is necessary to screw around with the display resolution as Splashtop doesn't like full screen programs. All that being said, VN's on the iPad's retina display are bloody gorgeous.

There however are a few cons
1. It eats up my Ipad's battery life.
2. Since it's essentially a video stream that CAN'T really buffer ahead, there is the occasional hiccup where sound cuts out and stops reading inputs ( however given the static nature of VN's it isn't really a problem)
3. A little stuttery on 3g/4g
4. People give you weird looks if you're playing an 18+ scene and are in a public place.

(Not a personal recommendation on my part, I do not own an ipad and do not have any relationship with the app in question, I just thought some folks might be interested.)

puzzle quest... with poker?

money and the app store

Another helpful little artist about how rich you are(n't) likely to get on the iphone

biting the hand that feeds

FUCKING GOOGLE FIX THE FUCKING BLOGGER ALREADY FUCK

anyway.

http://i.imgur.com/wD4X6.png

iphone. gatekeeping.

I CANNOT POST LIKE THIS.

this interface still sucks, blogger

On freemium, and on how a wildly popular game can continue to be a numbers disaster if you're not very, very careful with how you organise your income streams...

Outwitters

and dear god blogger WHY? WHY do you put all my labels in a hidden panel and then when I unhide them, display them all jumbled together and broken mid-word across line boundaries so they're incredibly hard to read and I can't find anything? GOOGLE WHY DO YOU SUCK SO HARD AT USER INTERFACE DESIGN????

signal boost

Reposting from the Let's Play thread:

Dangan Ronpa is now available on iOS. A free download from the Japanese appstore gets you the first chapter of the game, with the rest available as in-app purchase. The whole game costs 2000 yen, which is about $25. Considering it probably costs about three times as much to import the game, I'd say it's a good price to pay.

The app is universal, customised for both the iPhone and the iPad (iPhone 4 or 4S required). It features retina graphics that look better than PSP in the appstore screenshots. An Android version is also supposed to come out, but the news I've read only mentioned iOS for now.

Getting a Japanese account to download the free chapter is easy and guides are readily available elsewhere. Once downloaded, you can switch back to your original iTunes account and still play the game. If you want to buy the game without a Japanese credit card, there are several places online that sell Japanese iTunes gift cards you can use to charge the account with.

Here's the iTunes link. If you like this game and LP, I'd like nothing more than if you give some money back to the creators. Now there's a fairly easy way to do so. Who knows, maybe if they see a bunch of downloads from non-Japanese IP addresses they might think again about an official localisation.

In case you've missed my earlier comments, this is an awesome semi-VN (There are choices, but the plot doesn't actually branch, and there are a lot of minigames) involving murder mysteries and bizarre characters, currently Japanese only and being Let's Played on Something Awful.

As I do not have an iphone or ipad this is still not much use to me, and I have no idea how many people are willing to jump through these hoops for a game they still can't really read, but one can always hope. I'd certainly love to see these games brought over into English. 999 did okay, right?

... however, if anyone knows where I can lay hands on a monobear hoodie, DO WANT.

i ain't afraid of no ghost

So looks like someone is attempting to make a hidden object / RPG combo (for the ipad, so I can't actually play it.)

I had a vague idea for how to mix up the super-fancy-shiny-arty Hidden Object game style popular in casual portals and a proper RPG once. To get the standard cluttered house full of junk, it was to be about GHOSTBUSTING. You frantically search for objects invested with ectoplasm or whatever in order to help you defeat the spooks.

Obviously never going to do it though, so feel free to play with that.