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What's this? A bonus round of app sales... on a Thursday? Still your beating hearts, dear readers of mine, because while I have more apps for you today, I've decided to take a different approach. Due to the volume of yesterday's post and the amount of questionable applications in it, I am trying something new today.
The dating simulator genre is still somewhat niche, so here's a quick breakdown if you haven't heard about it. In a typical anime-style dating simulator, you play as a young man or woman (often high school or college age) looking for love. This usually means talking to a bunch of different characters and potential romantic interests in branching dialogue. It's like an old-school adventure game, but the stakes are your love life instead of saving the world. Hatoful Boyfriend [sic] is like that, except that all your suitors are pigeons.
I recall with fondness the endless speculative arguments I heard around the elementary school lunch table in the 90s: who would win in a fight between Batman and Wolverine? Goku and Superman? Bill Clinton and Emilio Estevez? (There was always that one weird kid.) Imagine the same arguments happening in a university zoology department, and you might just find the inspiration for Animelee, an old-fashioned one-on-one fighter recently published in the Play Store. It's all about animals beating the crap out of each other. Check out the eye-popping trailer below:
It has now been over two months since the Lollipop OTA updates for Nexus devices began rolling out en masse. So far, every Nexus and Google Play Edition device has received the bump to Google's latest sweet treat...except the cellular Nexus 7s. If you own a 2012 3G or 2013 LTE model, you've been left out in the cold, remaining on KitKat unless you want to venture into the world of custom ROMs.
Following on the success of the original xkcd Phone (which featured a blend of Android and iOS, a side-facing camera, and the ability to scream when falling), a successor has arrived that offers some of the best tech that 2014 has to offer.
Not all new features are created equal, and this particular change has us kind of scratching our heads wondering why Google would consider it a good idea. In Lollipop, you can now access your quick settings straight from the lockscreen. This way you can toggle Wi-Fi, cellular data, and Bluetooth without unlocking the device, even if it's secured behind a passphrase.
Google's developers are notorious for including little jokes and easter eggs throughout all of their products. When your job consists of writing thousands of lines of code and testing obscure bugs, you're going to lose your mind without some kind of outlet. We usually see their sense of humor show up in Google Doodles, easter eggs, and even in the occasional bug report.
Perhaps you recall back in 2012 when Google caught some flack for its 10-device limit on Play Music access with only four deauthorizations per year. It was forced to backpedal and allow users to deauthorize unlimited devices, and all was well with the world. Well, until now. It looks like Google has started enforcing a limit of four deauthorizations per year once again. Support docs and the Play Music settings list the limit. That means even regular users could suddenly find themselves unable to use All Access or get to their own stored tunes.
Classic American diners and 70s-era video games go hand in hand. No, wait a minute. That's an insane statement. Those things don't have anything to do with one another... until now. Denny's, the after-hours haunt of college students and cross-country travelers all over the United States, has launched a special version of three Atari video games. The app icon has Denny's bacon strips in place of the iconic stripes in Atari's logo. That tells you pretty much all you need to know.
Some characters have to be shoehorned into an endless runner, but for Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog, the genre is a natural fit. Now Sega is offering a Nintendo-style promotion that's only available for Android. Here's your chance to take our lovable green Bugdroid out for a spin, as the developers have dropped it into the game and are daring players to see if machines really are better at everything.
LG has a new commercial for the G Flex online, and it is exceptionally bizarre – and not in a good way. In the ad, a man receives a new G Flex, but upon opening the box his hand is transformed into a horrifying living phone with a mouth and an ear. He doesn't seem appropriately concerned about this.
Have you heard about the company that just announced a smart watch? Which one? All of them. The people who decide what kind of products are going to be made have universally decided that wearable tech is the next big thing. Whether that's Google Glass, the Pebble, or something else, everyone wants to strap more technology to your person. The new site What The F*** Is My Wearable Strategy successfully lampoons the plethora of bizarre wearable tech ideas with a simple (and amusing) formula.
We almost certainly won't have hoverboards or flying DeLoreans in 2015, but Amazon is aiming to give us the next best thing: crazy-fast package delivery via flying drones. Yes, people, welcome to the future. Though there are obvious hurdles to overcome before these autonomous delivery robots become a reality, Amazon hopes that one day, "Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today."
Welcome to the latest entry in our Bonus Round series, wherein we tell you all about the new Android games of the day that we couldn't get to during our regular news rounds. Consider this a quick update for the dedicated gamers who can't wait for our bi-weekly roundups, and don't want to wade through a whole day's worth of news just to get their pixelated fix. Today we've got an interestingly ancient racing game, a tug-of-war tower defense title, and a game that I wouldn't play in front of my grandma. Without further ado:
Did you know that some companies and products have the same name as other companies and products? Crazy, right? To use a geek-friendly example, there's a brand of laundry detergent called "Linux." Now, Try to follow along with me here: there's a brand of conventional automatic and quartz wristwatches called Android. The American company has been around since 1991. They've never really blown up as a brand, but they've been making reliable watches for two decades. The Android watches have nothing to do with Android, the company founded by Andy Rubin that created Android, the mobile operating system.
The Tekken series is one of Namco's biggest properties, a beloved handful of games that helped pioneer the 3D one-on-one fighting genre. Tekken Arena is an embarrassing mobile cash-in, with no 3D element to speak of and barely any portion that could be called "fighting." It might just be the most absurd deviation from the central element of a gaming property that I've ever seen.
Japan loves vending machines. You know those machines with iPods and Bose headphones at the airport? Japan had them first, among, many, many others, including machines for liquor, live bait, produce, Pokemon, and various other slightly insane things. Now it looks like Google is joining the fray with a promotional machine that dispenses Android games right to your phone. What?
When you think of Disney's late-80s cartoon DuckTales, you think of thrilling, white-knuckle class shooters in the vein of Team Fortress 2. Wait, no, that's not right: you think of the theme song that's been running through your head on and off for the last 25 years. Then you think about semi-wholesome kid's entertainment about ducks swimming in huge piles of gold. In fact, a class-based, over-the-shoulder shooter game is probably the last thing you'd think of in relation to DuckTales.
Smartwatches are a young category. Superfluous at best and just plain dorky at worst, I've yet to see one that makes me say "wow, I've gotta have that." And if smartwatches have yet to receive their killer application, that's doubly true for the inevitable wave of cheap accessories that will try to cash in on the craze. Case in point: The Bem Wireless Speakerwatch.
There's a new app available from the San Francisco Metro Transit Authority: an official Muni bus guide called Muni+. It's available right now for Android and iOS. And this dual release seems to have given the promotional department a bit of a problem. See if you can tell what it is by looking at this freeze frame of the new TV commercial now airing in the Bay area.