News

Rovio Entertainment is following up its popular Star Wars mobile game and toy line with Angry Birds Star Wars 2 on September 19th. ABSW2 will feature over 30 playable characters, and Hasbro-created "telepods" that interact with the game. A telepod is a physical toy that represents a playable character within the Angry Birds universe. Players can unlock the characters in the game by individually purchasing the toys, and using their device's built-in camera to activate them. Rovio's new telepods are a lot like Activision's very popular Skylanders toys, which are used with the various Skylanders console video games.

NFC-based video games are becoming so popular that even Disney has taken a crack at them with its planned Disney Infinity series. Disney Infinity is set to launch a few months ahead of Activision's newest Skylanders game SWAP Force on August 18th. It will be interesting to see how consumers respond with so many NFC-based video games / toys being released around the same time. These games can be very pricey after purchasing both the starter sets and individual characters. A Skylanders starter set retails for around $70, and each individual toy costs around $10 to $14. It is unknown at this time how much the individual Angry Birds telepods will set you back.

Jailbreakers who downloaded Square Enix's new game Deus Ex: The Fall on Thursday found a nasty little surprise, the action-based RPG would not let them fire their guns! Deus Ex is not the first app to block jailbreakers, DirectTV and a few others games also don't support jailbroken devices. However, Deus Ex is $7 to download, and Square Enix gave no indication that the game would not support the 7 million jailbroken iPhones and iPads floating around the world.

Of course, the jailbreak community responded quickly by releasing a fix called xCon to the ModMyI repo in Cydia, but not before Square Enix felt the backlash. On Friday, the Japanese video game developer issued this statement through Eurogamer:

While iOS gaming fans can download Infinity Blade II free for a limited time, other news related to the franchise is not so positive. According to MacRumors, Chair Co-Founder and Creative Director Donald Mustard officially confirmed that Infinity Blade Dungeons has been abandoned.

The highly anticipated prequel to the Infinity Blade universe garnered rave reviews when previewed last year. Unfortunately, after first delaying the game then putting the project on hold, Epic Games had to cancel the project after the studio working on the game closed.

Lady Gaga has announced the official release date for her new app-album. The album entitled ARTPOP, will be released as an iPad, iPhone and computer application on November 11. Gaga describes it as "a musical and visual engineering system that combines art, fashion, and technology with a new interactive worldwide community."

This is the first major app/album release since Bjork's Biophilia was released for iOS devices in 2011. The app was designed by Gaga's development team TechHaus, and aims to bring back the album experience by blending fashion and art with music. The launch of the album will be preceded by an "artRAVE", with collaborations from a number of famous artists including Robert Wilson, conceptual sculptor Jeff Koons and performance artist Marina Abramovic. Gaga will also release a new single from the album on August 19.

Everyone who uses social media knows that Facebook and alcohol don't mix well. That's why developer Pierre Sarda has released Secret.li -- a new iOS app that gives users the ability to control who sees their images, and allows them to automatically destroy photos after a predetermined time.

The new iOS app was actually designed for people who are put off by the lack of privacy on Facebook, but still want to share personal photos with family and friends. Secret.li allows a person to upload any image from their iPhone library, and choose who can view it. The user's chosen friends will then receive an in-app and Facebook notification letting them know that an image was uploaded for them to see. The Photos uploaded through the app are eventually destroyed at the end of a specific time limit determined by the user.