You know what’s the problem with Diablo III (aside from all the connection troubles people have been having)? You still play with a keyboard and a mouse. A new Kickstarter project has come up where you get to cast spells and engage in combat using a real magic wand. It’s called Incantor.

Of course, it’s not a real magic wand. Instead, it’s a Bluetooth connected controller for your iPhone or other smartphone and you make your way through the game by “shaping” spells in the air. The wand is also used to lock onto targets on the screen and otherwise play the massively multiplayer online game. The initial release calls for two or three game modes with ten classes of wands.

If you head over to the Kickstarter page, you’ll see that the developers are seeking $100,000 of funding by June 8th. Considering that this looks like little more than a mobile version of a Wii game, I’m not sure it’ll really enchant enough gaming interest.

[Source]

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World of Warcraft may not be quite as hot a topic as it once was, but the MMORPG is still hugely popular and Blizzard is looking into expanding the franchise onto mobile platforms. Yes, you could playing WoW on your iPhone.

This comes by way of an interview with John Lagrave, Senior World of Warcraft developer at Blizzard. Understandably, he voices concerns about how to package the huge desktop game into the smaller screen of a handheld device like the iPhone. The graphics may not be as much of a problem these days, given the high calibre we’re seeing in some higher-end iOS games, but how would you map all the controls?

Yes, they could come out with a simplified version that still lets you get into WoW on the go, but Lagrave is quick to point out that they “won’t do it until it’s decent,” meaning that they don’t want to water down the experience. You would likely have to consider the data usage ramifications too, since the game has to be played online.

Instead of porting the full WoW game, Blizzard may entertain having WoW minigames that tap into the same universe. There are rumors that the “Mists of Pandaria” expansion could have a “pet battle system” and minigames that could then theoretically be played on your mobile device. Lagrave says that they “look at that, but we haven’t solved it.”

[Source]

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CyFi revealed her findings at the Defcon conference in Las Vegas as part of a competition to find young computer security experts. She found that you could manually advance the clock in certain games, allowing virtual crops to mature more quickly, for example. If you’re tired of waiting around in FarmVille, you may not need to wait anymore.

Is this cheating? Perhaps, but I did the same thing in Animal Crossing both on the GameCube and the Nintendo DS. I just couldn’t wait around for things to happen, so I jumped the clock and pretended it was the next day. CyFi felt the same: “It was hard to make progress in the game, because it took so long for things to grow. So I thought, ‘Why don’t I just change the time?’” she told CNET.

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You thought the ceaseless supply of fart apps was already juvenile enough? Think again. Get ready to fling some feces. Yes, like poop.

In perhaps a strange twist of creativity, a new iPhone game has squeezed its way onto the App Store and it’s called Angry Turds. Actually, to be more accurate, it’s apparently called “Angry T*rds for iPhone” since developer Adam Kotkin of Apps Genius thought he might have to censor “turds” to get approval.

The concept is anything but original. You take the mechanism behind Rovio’s Angry Birds and replace the birds with poop. And you replace the slingshot with an angry monkey. In addition to various sizes and styles of fecal matter, the monkey will also apparently sling coconuts and bananas.

If you’ve played Angry Birds, you’ve pretty much already played Angry Turds. That said, Rovio has managed to create quite the franchise with multiple spinoffs offering effectively identical gameplay, so go figure. Just as the world saw countless Tetris clones, we’re bound to see more Angry Birds clones, I guess. The free version of the turd-slinger gives you 10 levels and the 99-cent version has 30 levels.

[TC]

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Looking at the paid version of the mobile game, Rovio CEO Mikael Hed says that they have sold more than 12 million copies. Most of these come from the iPhone version, though some good cash probably rolled in through the iPad, Symbian, and webOS iterations of the series too. Even at a buck each, that’s over $12 million.

It gets even better with Android. Understandably free apps can get quite a bit more popular than paid ones and that’s exactly what happened with Rovio’s experiment on Google’s mobile OS. They’ve seen over 30 million downloads of the free Angry Birds. That’s mostly on Android, but “lite” versions on other platforms are included in that figure too.

Realizing that the ad-supported Angry Birds on Android is generating over a million dollars a day, this could be the ticket for an even bigger mobile advertising market. Using this money, Rovio is likely moving the franchise forward with a WP7 version, as well as sequels for more mainstream platforms like the Wii, XBLA, and PSN. Kudos to Rovio. Who said you can’t become a millionaire by sending furious fowl into wood, ice, and concrete structures?

[Tech Crunch]

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