The second week of spring turned out to be extremely eventful. Tim Cook announced the new iPad; Rovio spoke in detail about the new version of Angry Birds; GDC managed to start and end in San Francisco. About all this and not only in our new material.
Passion for the apple
On March 7, as if on the eve of International Women’s Day, the announcement of the third device in the iPad 3 line took place. As it turned out by the very end of the presentation, the new gadget does not have an ordinal number, however, as well as a letter name. So no triples and HD in the title. Simply and succinctly – “New iPad”.
The main innovation is a screen made using Retina technology, with a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. This, for comparison, is almost a third more than the full HD resolution, which, recall, is 1920 x 1080 pixels.
The processor remained dual-core, another thing is that the chip responsible for graphics has become quad-core. It is assumed that this will have a beneficial effect on the possible quality of graphics. At least screenshots of new projects for the third iPad allow us to hope for this.
Another key difference from the previous model is the support of the LTE wireless interface. However, in Russian conditions this is irrelevant – we do not have networks with support for such an interface and are not expected in the near future.
Apple also changed the optics in the tablet to the one used in the production of the iPhone 4S. However, the company was stingy with megapixels. There are only five of them. By the way, Siri support has not been added.
The price of the device is standard: from $ 499. As for the cost, according to UBM TechInsights analysts, the new iPad model with 16 GB of memory and LTE support is only $ 310.
Stray birds
Almost simultaneously with the announcement of the third version of the iPad, it became known about the release date of a new game in the Angry Birds universe. Moreover, detailed information about the revolutionary changes in the gameplay has appeared.
Rovio’s new creation is called Angry Birds Space. It is planned that the game will be released on March 22. What is especially curious is that it is being done jointly with NASA. At least, astronaut Don Petit, who presented the game while aboard the International Space Station, said that “NASA is going to popularize space exploration with the help of Angry Birds.”
Perhaps it is thanks to this collaboration that the mechanics of one of the most popular games on mobile platforms have changed a lot. We are not talking about fundamental changes – players still launch birds with a slingshot at pigs. Another thing is that everything now happens in zero gravity, asteroids and planets (with atmospheres) fly on the levels, and there are new birds in the player’s arsenal.
Annual Developers Conference
From March 5 to March 9, the annual game developers conference was held in sunny California. We will write about it in detail this week – there were a lot of interesting reports and some of them got online, in addition, we are already preparing a small report, so keep your finger on the pulse.
In the meantime, let’s just run through the most important thing in a nutshell – prizes and awards.
The culmination of GDC is the Game Developers Choice Awards. Everything is as serious here as at the Oscar ceremony, because the award is presented not by the players, but by colleagues. However, as in the case of Oscar, the intrigue leaves much to be desired.
We will not go through the full list of winners and nominees, we will only mention that Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP was recognized as the best portable game, which beat such serious competitors as Super Mario 3D Land and Jetpack Joyride.
Also, the 14th IGF festival of independent game developers was held within the framework of GDC, during which the fresh hit of Simogo – Beat Sneak Bandit was recognized as the best game of the year for mobile platforms.