Macgasm

This is a guest post by Phillipe Bosher, an 18 year old from the UK who is headed for Oxford University.

At the Games Developers’ Conference 2009, Neil Young, head of ngmoco, held a talk entitled “Why The iPhone Changed Everything.” In it, he spoke of how the iPhone revolutionised not only the handheld gaming market, but also the way people played video games forever. Some were convinced by his impassioned speech; others felt that it was purely the ramblings of a man trying to succeed in a tough market.

Recently, I was able to meet with Joe Wee and Chris Byatte, both Directors at Chillingo, Carmen Pearson, Global Head of PR and Communications at Chillingo, and David Amor, Creative Director at Relentless Software. Over the course of two interviews, I asked them about the iPhone, the way they approached development/publishing on the iOS platform, and whether they agreed with Young’s 2008 talk that the iPhone changed everything.

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We’ve recently gotten our hands on a developer build of an upcoming iOS game: Hard Lines, from Spilt Milk Studios. Andrew Smith — the person behind the game — has previously won a BAFTA for his work, and we are pleased to report that this shows in Hard Lines. In this title, players must guide their  character — Lionel — through an arena which is inspired from the classic Nokia game, Snake.

One of the six gameplay modes is called Gauntlet, whereby players must outsmart the AI to gain as many kills of luminous cretins as possible. With some great pop culture references — including one reference to none other than Chuck Norris — Lionel is no Snake character, even though Hard Lines offers such a mode for you retro players. Check out the trailer for Hard Lines after the jump.

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Apple is no stranger to breaking a few records. It seems like Apple breaks all of its own records at every Keynote the company holds. But the company is also capable of a Guinness World Record or two, and has been awarded just that for the iPhone 4 and its App Store. Even App Store residents Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies got in on the record-breaking action.

The iPhone 4 was awarded  a Guinness World record for being the fastest selling, ahem, portable gaming device, ahead of the Nintendo 3DS and Sony’s PSP. The iPhone 4 sold an astonishing 1.5 million units on its launch day on June 24, 2010, in comparison to the PSP, which sold 200,000 on its launch day.

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Monday is probably the worst day of the week for most people. That depressing feeling of having to get out of bed in the morning and leave for work gets even the happiest people down. So, with the help of the team over at the fantastic Realmac Software, we are offering you fine readers a chance to win one of eight copies of LittleSnapper for Mac to brighten up your Monday.

LittleSnapper allows you to quickly snapshot anything on your screen and then organize it however you like, by categorizing, rating and annotating images. Users can then share images directly to Ember, Flickr and SFTP from right inside LittleSnapper. The application looks and works fantastically and is an indispensable tool for many writers, bloggers and design types across the world.

Find out how you can win one of eight copies of LittleSnapper — which is worth $29.99 and requires Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later — after the jump.

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It’s fair to say that MobileMe is a perfect example that Apple is a company run by human beings, which just like you and I, are prone to failure or making a mistake or two. Upon its launch alongside the iPhone 3G in 2008, MobileMe was rocky at best and suffered several issues, including losing customers’ emails entirely. The $99 per year service looked fantastic when demoed at the Keynote, but just didn’t work as advertised.

Adam Lashinsky of Fortune seems to have gotten the low down on Steve Jobs’ reaction to the service and its failings, and it would seem that the Apple CEO was livid with his staff, and has quite the tongue on him.

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Online retailer Other World Computing (OWC) is now offering a massive 480GB Solid State Drive (SSD) for current MacBook Air models. OWC say that the drive — which will set you back an equally mammoth $1579.99 — boasts up to a 68% speed increase when compared to the factory option SSDs made by Toshiba and Samsung, depending on which MacBook Air model customers own.

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Today Electronic Arts announced that it has reached an agreement to buy Australian games outfit Firemint, most famous for its smash hit Flight Control and Real Racing iOS games. The acquisition of Firemint by EA is another indication of the games publisher’s intent on dominating the ever-expanding mobile games market — EA purchased Angry Birds publisher Chillingo in October 2010 for around $20 million.

EA also said in the press release that it had recently bought Mobile Post Production Inc. who specialize in porting games across mobile platforms. EA will use the two companies’ expertise going forward in the mobile games market.

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Anti-virus outfit Intego has discovered a new malware program called MACDefender, which attacks Macs via SEO Poisoning. When unassuming users click a link after searching for something online in Safari, for instance, they are taken to a page which contains JavaScript which then downloads a file automatically. The group reports:

“In this case, the file downloaded is a compressed ZIP archive, which, if a specific option in a web browser is checked (Open “safe” files after downloading in Safari, for example), will open.”

 

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