Game developer Gameloft is running a massive sale for the next week. Starting this morning at 10:00AM Pacific, all of the company’s games availabel from the Android Market will be available for 99 cents. The sale runs through 10:00AM PST on January 5th, 2012.

Some of Gameloft’s titles are always just under a buck, but some of the company’s higher-end games such as Order & Chaos Online and Modern Combat 3 normally run $6.99.

Gameloft is often criticized for their lack of originality (Order & Chaos is basically a World of Warcraft clone, Eternal Legacy is a Final Fantasy clone, and Starfront: Collision is a Starcraft clone). But their games are usually well designed, with excellent graphics.

Unfortunately not all of the company’s games are available from the Android Market, so not all of Gameloft’s Android games will be on sale, but titles including Asphalt HD, Texas Hold’em Poker 2, and The Adventures of Tintin should all be eligible.

via Droid Gamers

OnLive is a service that lets you play video games by streaming them over the internet. We’re not talking about dinky Flash-based games here though. We’re talking about console-quality games that you’d normally need a Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 to play.

The company offers a box that you can connect to your TV to turn it into a game console, as well as a wireless remote control. This week the company launched new apps for iOS and Android that also turn your phone or tablet into a portable console-quality gaming system.

OnLive has been showing off the service since this summer, but now the company’s mobile apps are finally available for download from the App Store or the Android Market.

I took the service for a spin on my NOOK Tablet, and there’s a lot to like. The selection of games may not be all-inclusive, but it’s pretty good. And the games felt snappy and responsive even though I was basically using the tablet to control a game running on a remote server.
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Video game retailer GameStop appears to be working on a service that would let Android smartphone and tablet users stream video games over the internet.

In other words, you wouldn’t just buy a game, download it to your device and run it. Instead the game would be running on a remote server and you’d use your mobile device to login and play. The upshot is that you may be able to play games which may be far large or resource-intensive to run on a smartphone.

Joystiq noticed several job postings for a new GameStop Android division which allude to the new service. GameStop also acquired a game-streaming service called Spawn Labs last month. The company’s technology makes it possible to stream console games over the internet allowing you to play on a computer.

The technology also makes it possible to purchase or rent a game and start playing immediately, since you don’t need to download a full game or insert physical media into your gaming console.

There’s no word on when GameStop’s service for Android might launch.

Electronic Arts is running a promotion this weekend allowing you to grab almost 30 of the game company’s apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad for just under a buck. The company is also discounting a number of Android games, but there aren’t as many 99 cent titles for Android.

Here are a few that caught my eye:

iPhone/iPod touch

• Monopoly
• Tetris
• The Sims 3
• Need for Speed Hot Pursuit
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Read the rest of this entry »

A number of phones and tablets are expected to hit the market with dual core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processors this year, bringing high speed 1 GHz processors and high performance 3D and HD graphics. But a platform is only as good as the apps designed to run on it. Fortunately, it looks like game developers are starting to release apps designed to run on devices with Tegra chips.

A quick search of the Android Market today shows 10 games, including Samurai II: Vengeance, a new version of Spectral Souls for Tegra-based systems, and versions of Fruit Ninja and Backbreaker that have been optimized for the platform. Dungeon Defenders also now has extra features for Tegra-based devices.

It should be interesting to see how well these games sell. While there are millions of Android devices on the market, only a portion of the newest devices have NVIDIA Tegra 2 chips, which means that developers are writing apps for a market they hope emerges this year. It seems like writing apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad would generally be a safer bet — but if the Motorola XOOM, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 or other Tegra 2-based Android tablets turn into big success stories this year, the developers behind these apps could certainly stand to benefit.

NVIDIA is also expected to launch a Tegra Zone app soon, to make it easier to find apps optimized for the platform.

You can check out a few demos of Tegra 2 optimized games after the break.

Updte: Monster Madness is also now available for $9.99. The game is based on the Unreal Engine 3 and it’s one of the games NVIDIA showed off when pushing the Tegra 2 chip as a gaming platform at CES earlier this year.

via Android Police and Droid Gamers

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There’s a rumor going around that Research in Motion is working on the next-generation of its BlackBerry Messenger service. According to a rumor posted in the BBBlueZone forum,  BlackBerry Messenger 6 will include social gaming over the BBM network.

The game platform sounds a lot like the Xbox Live integration in Windows Phone 7 or the Game Center feature in iOS. Users will be able to use their BBM user names as a gamer tag, track achievements, and possibly share your information with your BBM contacts.

This is all in keeping with RIM’s announcement last year that it was opening up the BBM social platform to third party developers.

The new messenger service may also support larger groups, cross chat, and more. BBM 6 will reportedly support devices running BlackBerry Messenger 5 and up.

via PocketBerry

The developer of the first Playstation emulator for Google Android is back, with version 2. The new app adds a framerate counter option and automatic frameskipping to make games play more smoothly. The developer recommends only running psx4droid v2 on phones with 60MHz or faster processors.

The new app is on sale for $1.99 for a limited time. The original app is still available from the Android Market for $5.99 — and the developer is not offering a free upgrade to the new version, so if you want the latest bug fixes, you’re going to need to pony up a few bucks. The developer says the reason for the new version is that save states from the old emulator aren’t compatible with the new app.

Keep in mind, the emulator requires a valid PlayStation BIOS file to run properly. If you don’t know what that means, you might want to check out a set of step by step instructions for using psx4droid from xda-developers.

via Droid Gamers

Sony has been putting out portable PlayStation devices for a couple of years now, and it looks like the company’s next step will be a Sony Ericsson PlayStation phone. But while earlier devices ran a proprietary operating system, it looks like the new phone will run Google Android 2.3 with a special PlayStation app for gaming.

A few leaked videos of the phone have hit YouTube, and while we don’t have a good look at the gaming experience, we can clearly see that the phone looks like a typical Android slider, but instead of a slide-out keyboard it has a slide-out gaming pad which is kind of ugly, but functional looking. There’s also a PlayStation app which you can pull up to view a list of games.

It’s not clear whether games will be available for purchase through the Android Market or a third party store. But given some of the high quality games already available for Android, I suspect we’ll see some titles with killer graphics and decent gameplay soon enough, and the physical directional pad has got to be easier than the touch-based controls for 3D shooters, RPGs, and other mobile titles which often feel like they were designed for a gaming console rather than a touchscreen phone.

You can check out the videos after the break.

via Engadget

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