castle

Could the fruits of Apple's recent purchase of the iCloud.com domain already be showing up as a new cloud-based music service in the latest build of its upcoming Mac OS X Lion?

Following Apple's latest release of its Lion Developer Preview last Friday, French tech site Consomac.fr (Google Translate Version) spotted a reference to a hidden feature in the build codenamed "Castle," to which users can supposedly migrate their existing MobileMe accounts. Seeing this as evidence of a new major cloud-based initiative, the site believes Castle will include MobileMe, indicating that the new project … Read more

Atari's Greatest Hits lets you relive the early history of video gaming, giving you tons of old-school arcade and Atari 2600 hits on your iPhone. But it's not without flaws. Games like the original Asteroids, Tempest, Gravitar, Crystal Castles, and many more are available via in-app purchases packaged with their associated Atari 2600 games and some extras. In other words, the Atari Greatest Hits app itself is free, but if you want to play Tempest, for example, you'll need to buy the Tempest pack (99 cents), which comes with Tempest, Tempest for Atari 2600, Outlaw (2600), and … Read more

Carcassonne is the extremely well-done iOS version of the popular, German-style board game of the same name.

The interface of Carcassonne is a faithful, interactive adaptation of the physical board game, in which players take turns placing small, square tiles to create a medieval landscape with roads, cities, cloisters, and fields. In some ways, the touch-screen Carcassonne is almost superior to the physical game. You can touch and drag tiles into place, rotating them with a tap, and the app highlights legal placement options (and marks with a scratched "X" any squares that can no longer be used). … Read more

The big Apple news this week was the announcement that The Beatles music collection is finally available at the iTunes App Store, but that wasn't the only news to come out of Cupertino, Calif. iOS 4.2 for iPhone and iPad is extremely close to release, and we put together a slideshow of some of the new features across both devices. Check out our hands-on look at the iOS 4.2 Gold Master and the slideshows for each device here.

This week's apps include an image-editing app that offers a big list of useful tools and a castle defense game with RPG elements and a surprising amount of depth.… Read more

Catapult Madness is an artillery-based casual arcade game in which you try to fire peasants from a catapult as far as possible.

The side-scrolling interface has three parts: a workshop screen (where you buy upgrades to make your peasants fly further), the catapult screen (where you carefully time your button taps to determine the speed and angle of the catapult shots), and the battlefield that your peasants fly over (according to the game's thin backstory, you're trying to reach a neighboring castle 50,000 feet away to ask for help in a battle). The catapult itself won't … Read more

Axe in Face--Defense of the Daffodils is a silly, yet challenging game that borrows elements from many classic iPhone games in the iTunes App Store to make for a fun time-waster. The object of the game is to defend a garden of daffodils from an approaching onslaught of baddies (think Plants vs. Zombies) by drawing a path from your viking warrior across the screen to throw your ax.

The ax will return to you like a boomerang, which comes in handy for hitting foes as the ax circles back around, but be careful not to draw complex paths because you … Read more

Crush the Castle is the iPhone adaptation of a popular Flash game, a physics-based, medieval-themed artillery shooter with clever levels and quite a few extras.

You control a trebuchet--a powerful and accurate catapult--which you use to topple nearly a hundred different castles, one by one. Aiming takes practice, but the interface is easy: you tap once to set the trebuchet in motion, then again to release your payload. You can also tap to switch ammo, as you earn new types of projectiles such as clusters of stones and even bombs. Your goal on each level is to kill everyone in … Read more

Angry Birds Lite is a free, 12-level preview of Angry Birds, an addictive physics-based puzzler with a lot of personality.

You're helping a bunch of birds, as they wreak vengeance upon a crew of smug little egg-stealing pigs. Basically a one-player, turn-based artillery game, Angry Birds has a dead-simple interface: you just pull back on a slingshot to launch birds one at a time, with your finger position determining the speed and trajectory of each bird. The only other interaction comes when new birds (essentially, different ammo types) are introduced: a tiny, MIRV-like bluebird and a speedy yellow bunker-buster, … Read more

Souptoys is a fun and imaginative game in which users manipulate all kinds of onscreen toys with delightful effects. In a world where violent children's games are all too common, Souptoys is refreshingly innocent and surprisingly fun.

Souptoys isn't a game as much as a set of onscreen toys, as is suggested by the fact that its components are kept in a virtual toy box. What will you find in the toy box? Anything you'd find in a real one: balls, stuffed animals, blocks, roller skates, and much more, plus a few things you probably wouldn't … Read more