GAME CASA .NET

Konami Releases Lyric-Matching Rhythm Title RhymePlayer–Finger Gaming

Rhythm genre pioneer Konami has launched the latest title in its expansive music games catalog. RhymePlayer ($1.99) challenges players to tap song lyrics in time to the beat of a background music track.

RhymePlayer’s gameplay closely resembles Konami’s iPhone dance game Dance Dance Revolution S. Scrolling lyrics appear at the bottom of the screen and approach a timing line at the top.

Once the appropriate lyric reaches the timing line, players must tap the screen to sync the words to the song.

RhymePlayer includes a selection of five officially licensed music tracks:

Bell Biv DeVoe – Poison
The Cover Girls – Show Me
Jackson 5 – ABC
Lady Gaga – Just Dance
Lifehouse – First Time

Konami has a neat concept here, but with only five songs and two difficulty levels, there isn’t much variety or replay incentive. An in-app store offering new songs would be a great addition — here’s hoping that Konami adds one in a future update.

iPad unveiled, EA and Gameloft lead gaming charge–Gamespot

After weeks of increasing hype, cash-flush hardware giant Apple Inc. finally took the wraps off of its wildly anticipated tablet computer at a San Francisco press event. As rumored, the device will be called the iPad, and it will resemble a large iPhone or iPod Touch. It will have a half-inch thick, 9.7-inch capacitive multi-touch screen and will weigh just 1.5 pounds.

According to GameSpot sibling site CNET, the iPad’s heart is an all-new 1GHz processor that places the CPU, graphics, and memory all on a single chip. The device has Bluetooth and a compass built in, and its battery life is around 10 hours–with over a month of standby. It will not, however, include a camera as MacBooks and iPhones do, nor will it support Adobe Flash, the ubiquitous browser software used by Web sites for animation. read more…

Apple Tablet Detected Running Games At Apple HQ, Research Group Says–Kotaku

The Apple Tablet is still just a unicorn, a publicly unseen beast of questionable evolutionary logic, but research group Flurry Analytics claimed yesterday to spot its presence at Apple headquarters and detected a heavy amount of gaming on the thing.

In a blog post on Sunday, Flurry’s vice president of marketing, Peter Farago, announced that his firm, which offers developers the ability to track activity of mobile applications, sniffed out heavy usage of programs running on “approximately 50 devices that match the characteristics of Apple’s rumored tablet device.” Flurry claims to be able to “reliably ‘place’ these devices geographically on Apple’s Cupertino campus.” read more…

GTA Chinatown Wars brings the battle to iPhone–Joystiq

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars keeps driving around for an audience, with the excellent handheld entry in the crime sim franchise quietly releasing on iPhone last night. TouchArcade notes that in its third platform iteration, behind DS and PSP, the $10 game uses on-screen buttons similarly to Gameloft’s Gangstar and retains the DS stylus minigames.

It would seem that those who can get around the button-less interface are in for a full GTA experience that costs less than a dime bag.

I originally saw Canabalt listed as one of the best indie games of 2009 and fell in love with the browser version.  I’d been toying around with picking up the iPhone version and finally convinced myself to spend the $2.99–I know, I’m a cheap bastard.  Here’s the low-down:

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