Stories By Chris Reed

The winners are in! See which lists you would like to see added to our GameFinder app, and find out who wins this week's promo codes.

Read More

On this week's podcast, Andrew laments sweatshop conditions in China, Jeremy discusses the delicate balance of Tumbledrop, and Chris gives props to the Giana Sisters despite their resemblance to another pair of videogame siblings.

Read More

Have you ever been sitting there in geometry class, bored, wishing you could use an array of weaponry to destroy every shape on the chalkboard? If so, Critical Wave has you covered. Like Meteor Blitz, this game wallops you with wave after wave of heat-seeking enemies in a way that would be overwhelming, if not for the flawless controls built in to help you take them on.

Read More

If you haven't begun gathering all the loose change you can find, it's time to start. Apple announced today that they're releasing the iPad in the US on Saturday, April 3, with the 3G version coming later in the month.

Read More

In the latest update, John Gore of Minigore fame has crossed through the matrix and landed in the Hook Champ-verse. He sports a new set of four levels that are filled with dive-bombing furries that fall from the sky. Luckily, he brings his gun with unlimited bullets with him.

Read More

If you love Super Mario Bros. but have always found it just a bit too masculine, then your dreams are about to come true. Giana Sisters gives you all the brick-breaking, fire-throwing, flag-reaching action you could want, and it wraps it up in a tidy feminine package.

Read More

This is where it all started. 23 years ago, the original Final Fantasy dropped on an unassuming world and helped lay the groundwork for every console RPG to come. Since then, the series has snowballed into one of the biggest franchises in videogame history, with its thirteenth iteration just around the corner. It's great to see this iconic series hit the iPhone, and what better place to start than the beginning?

Read More

Rise of the Triad: Dark War is a port of a PC game from that special time in the life of first-person shooters when the simple act of looking up and down was considered a cool new feature. It was 1995, two years after Doom defined the genre and a year before Duke Nukem 3D would make those alien bastards pay for shooting up his ride. In the iPhone version of RotT, what you get is an imperfect port of a pixely 3D shooter that never latched onto the popular imagination the way those other franchises did. As you might expect, there's a reason for that.

Read More

From the relentless action that drives this game forward to the triumphant, cinematic music that accompanies it, Brothers in Arms 2: Global Front is an impressively executed gaming experience. You play as David Wilson, a young soldier whose brother dies under mysterious circumstances during a battle in World War II. With no straight answers coming from Uncle Sam, you embark on a personal quest to discover the truth about what happened.

Read More

Do we really need another two-stick shooter? Like it or not, a new one has hit the App Store, in the form of Daisy Mae's Alien Buffet. While we appreciate a rhyming title as much as anyone, let's look at how the game itself holds up against other members of the genre, like Minigore, Guerilla Bob, and Meteor Blitz.

Read More

GT Racing: Motor Academy may be a car racing game, but it offers a truckload of content. You get 14 tracks that you can burn rubber on with over 100 licensed cars from 24 real auto makers. Three game modes are offered, featuring multiple styles of races and tons of personal options, from selecting your control input to upgrading your car's suspension. In short, you can drive it for a long time before it runs out of gas.

Read More

Since your character is onscreen at all times, and most action gamers are male, the developer of Tehra Dark Warrior did the only sensible thing with their heroine: gave her generous proportions and put her in a thong bikini. Say what you will about the protective qualities of such an outfit-- particularly for someone who fights demons all day-- but it makes for some flashy eye candy.

Read More

Plushed, the graphically impressive bunny-based platformer, has received an update. Your health has been boosted so that you can now sustain three hits before meeting your maker, OpenFeint integration has been added, and you now start from the last checkpoint you've reached when you close and re-open the game. These are all welcomed additions.

Read More

Take one part Hook Champ and one part Canabalt, mix them together and what do you get? You get Hellkid, a fun little high-score game that's a successful marriage of those two iPhone hits.

Read More

The first Heavy Mach was a well-oiled tank shooter that featured metric tons of lead-pumping action, but little in the way of level variety. The sequel delivers the same awesome metal-on-metal violence, but dispenses with traditional level progression in favor of open-world, mission-based gameplay. The question is, do the modifications turn the sequel into a locked-and-loaded war machine, or a wheeze-powered peashooter?

Read More

The computer game Spore was designed to appeal to the casual crowd just like The Sims did. While it may not have attained the ubiquity of that series, it was met with critical praise and popular success. It also spawned a series of smaller games. Spore Creatures is the second entry in the franchise to hit the App Store, after Spore Origins, and the goal is much the same: eat stuff to evolve. But this time, you do it on land.

Read More

Nearly two months in the making, the 1.3.1 update patches the shoddy online multiplayer experience in Modern Combat: Sandstorm. We can report that the update does in fact make multiplayer work, and that we have experienced no crashes or inability to connect since installing it. Better late than never, right?

Read More

It's clear from Apple's press event Wednesday that, like the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad will be an extremely capable gaming device. Judging by all the e-mails we received from developers since the announcement, they're very interested in the possibilities. But all you have to do is watch our hands-on videos to see that some games work better than others on the big screen.

Read More

The year may have started off slowly, but now publishers big and small have opened the floodgates and unleashed a wave of games onto the App Store. Now that the iPad is out of the bag and you no longer have a torrent of speculation to keep you occupied, you can pass the time waiting for its release by playing some of these new games.

Read More

Anyone who has used an electronic device regularly can come up with a litany of tweaks, updates, and improvements they would like to see implemented. As much as we love our iPhones and iPod Touches, we don't think they've reached a state of ultimate perfection yet. And since rumor has it that iPhone OS 4.0 might very well be announced at Wednesday's event, we thought we'd chime in with some features we'd like to see included.

Read More