Many a lunch hour during my university days was spent playing foosball with my friends. There was a table in the law building common space that was just there, free for us to play. It was great, but now that we’re in the digital age, there has to be something better, more digital and more portable.

Enter the appropriately named Classic Match Foosball Table. It’s a miniature foosball table where you can dock your Apple iPad and really engage in a game with virtual players on those virtual sticks. The cool thing is that you really do get eight 2-axis control bars that you would on a real table and turning them interacts with the digital game on your iPad’s screen. They’ve even included appropriate sound effects.

The iPad itself docks into the table so there’s no need to fumble with external power or clunky cables. It uses the 30-pin connector, though, so you won’t be able to use a 4th-gen iPad or the iPad mini.

I still don’t think it’s quite as good as having a rustic old foosball table with a couple of beers spilled on it, but the Classic Match Foosball Table will fit in a heck of a lot more dorm rooms. Find it for $99.99 on New Potato Tech.

[Source]

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Gameloft have got to be one of the biggest and most well-known developers for mobile gaming right now, as they’re constantly bringing out a variety of games spread throughout many different genres. For all you sports fans out there, Gameloft have now released the new Real Football 2013, which follows on from the 2012 version.

Team Management and Game Preparation

Team management is one of the most important feats in a decent football game, so important in fact, that Football Manager – a game just about managing a football team – has become an extremely successful series, proving that managing your team can be a whole game on its own.

Real Football 2013 isn’t top end when it comes to managing your team, but for a mobile game it’s acceptable. After you pick your team at the start of the game, your players will level up as you play more matches.

Before matches you’ll have a city screen which displays all the utilities available. You’ll be able to heal up and rest your players here, as well as train them for more skill on the field, and increase their income by upgrading buildings and searching for sponsors. This side of Real Football 2013 seems to rely heavily on in-app purchasable currency, with which you can speed up actions within the city utilities. Without the in-game currency you’ll have to wait a preset amount of time for the selected action to be completed, and the time won’t go down if the app is running in the background, which is painful for both you and your device’s battery.

The city utilities do give us a huge sense of progression though, and it’s from here that we can upgrade, buy and manage our player. This allows us to create a team that is personal to our own experiences. You may pick favorites and concentrate on maxing out their skills, or slowly build up the team together; it’s all up to you.

The Match

To be honest, I’ve never played many football games, but as soon as I picked Real Football up, I was reminded about how enjoyable football games can be. Real Football starts without much of an introduction, other than the voice of the commentator with an over exaggerated British accent, you haven’t got much information to go by.

Luckily the game is extremely easy to pick up. When in possession of the ball, you have a joystick for movement, and three helpfully labeled buttons; sprint, pass, and shoot. It’s pretty easy to control the character, and there are a few touch gestures to perform interesting moves, and these aren’t explained to you so you’ll have to experiment to find a good tactic for your time on the field.

When the other team is in possession of the ball the controls stay in the same position, but the three buttons are changed to sprint, tackle, and press. The controls are equally easy to use, although use tackle sparingly as it usually ends up with your selected player slide tackling another player and leaving the match with a red card. It took me till four players had been called off the match to realize that most of the tackling was done automatically when your player was close enough.

Overall, playing a match or two of Real Football 2013 is an enjoyable experience, and it’s something that would never have been possible on mobile devices a few years back, so a few bugs and limits due to the low spec hardware is understandable. That being said, I really hope that Gameloft finds a better method of player switching for Real Football 2014 because right now it becomes a very irritating aspect of the game.

You can either have the player switch mechanic set on automatic or manual, but both have their issues. On manual it becomes frustrating because it’ll often swap your players before you have enough time to react, causing you to swerve the newly selected player in the wrong direction. On automatic, it’s difficult to quickly switch players because you need to lift one of your hands off of the controls and double tap another player.

Gameloft could improve upon this by adding a control-lock for a second or two if you’re using automatic, which would let the CPU control the player for a second after switching so that you have enough time to react to the new change. Another possible method would be to add a player switch button that switches to the nearest player, which would be handy for manual mode.

RF 2013 vs RF 2012

What’s new, what’s old, and what’s missing?

The only real improvement to Real Football 2013 is the graphics, which will only be apparent if you have a higher-end handset or tablet. Other than that, there are a few additions to game mechanics, but Gameloft has disappointingly dropped a lot of features from 2012. There isn’t any way to play with a decent club team unlike RF 2012, and instead requires either a lot of time or a lot of money to upgrade your team within career mode. The current cool down time really needs to be fixed as well. On top of that, Real Football 2013 really needs to address the countdown timer issue which currently only depletes when the application is running on the screen. Previous Real Football player? You may be better sticking with 2012, but if you’ve got a decent device, then you may want to get it for the improved graphics.

Summary

Pros:

• Great graphics
• Decent team progression and management
• Easy to pick up and play
• Game is free

Cons:

• Game is missing features from previous year
• 2013 has become more ‘freemium heavy’ than the previous year
• Bad player switching controls
• No mode other than the main career

Download Real Football 2013 on Google Play

Download Real Football 2013 on iOS

The post Real Football 2013 – Android Review appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

In Football, if you mistake your opponent’s head for the ball, you are out of the game. In Baseball, if you test the strength of your bat on the head of your opponent, you might not play ever again. In Ultimate Tazer Ball, if you pass an electric current through your opponent’s body with a stun gun, you may just end up being player of the game. The sport actually lets you cause serious injuries to the members of the opposing team, sounds perfect.

But it’s not only about stun guns, although that is the only thing that makes the sport a bit interesting. A ball, which looks similar to a huge beachball, is also involved and the players have to simply run around with the ball (for putting it into the opponent’s net) and in between make sure that they do not get tasered.

The rules of the sport are not very complicated. You have two teams with four players each competing for getting the ball into the opposing team’s net. Only the player who is carrying the ball can be given the shock treatment. Well, that’s about it.

Now you know the reason why people think that the game isn’t real although a video of it on YouTube has been watched over 1 million times.  At least they are trying to make the game a bit more exciting by using mean expressions in between games. And they are also claiming that the tazing is very painful, but we understand that the taser used is not as powerful as the ones used by the police.

But Canadian Eric Prum, the sport’s founder, is serious about the sport and will be organizing a tournament in March in Bangkok. The four teams participating are Philadelphia Killawatts (are these guys serious?), San Diego Spartans, LA Nightlight and Toronto Terror.

The post Ultimate Tazer Ball Is One Dangerously Funny Sport (Video) appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Vuvuzela being played by football fan in South Africa Photo: Flickr

The first World Cup 2010 game I had watched was different.  It wasn’t the broadcast picture, although I was hoping for an NFL quality feed.  It was a humming background noise that slowly grew my agitation.  I later found it to be a “traditional” instrument of the South African’s known as the Vuvuzela.  This little $3 horn caused not only grief to me, but the players on the field who had to endure its humming harmonic resonance for no less then 90 minutes per match. I said during the match, “cant the audio technicians over there filter out that frequency?” Well, they probably can, but won’t because of the Fifa President’s official message sent out on twitter “I don’t see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country.”  It’s one thing to use the instrument for a goal, or exciting moment of a match, but all the freaking time?  Elgato has taken things into their own hands and released a special edition of EyeTV 3.4 that offers a feature called the “Vuvuzela Filter” to dampen the buzzing sound of the instrument.  Elgato says that this feature can be quickly turned on and off for the “full audio experience” leading me to believe it filters much more than the Vuvuzela. Regardless, if it can remove that blasted buzz, it’s worth a look.

Elgato’s press release:

San Francisco, Calif. – June 23, 2010 – Elgato announces a Special Edition of EyeTV 3.4 that offers a feature called a “Vuvuzela Filter”. This filter dampens the stadium buzz of live football broadcasts on the Mac, and can be quickly switched on and off for the full audio experience at any time during the game. The Vuvuzela Filter is available in EyeTV during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and will disappear with the next software update.

Availability
EyeTV 3.4 Special Edition is available as a free update for EyeTV 3 users. To install the Vuvuzela Filter, simply use this Link. Elgato EyeTV tuners are available at the Elgato Online Store (www.elgato.com), at Apple retail stores and from local Mac resellers.

[Via Elgato]

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