Category: Games

For fans and players of Angry Birds 2, there is a big update rolling out in the Play Store for you.  The update brings a lot of new features to the game and, of course, new chapters to play.  When you get this update, which should come to you as an OTA update over the next day or so, you will have two new chapters to play with a total of 40 new levels within those chapters.  That brings the total for the game well over 200 total levels so you have plenty of things to keep you interested.  But that isn’t all for this update as you also have two new pig enemies to contend with in the game.

For those of you who play Pokemon Go, be on the look out for a sizable update coming to the game.  The update is a combination of new features and refinements to improve the game play and performance of the popular game.  The most notable new feature is the Buddy Pokemon addition.  Here you will be able to choose a Pokemon that you have captured as your buddy.  They will walk with you and be a part of your game avatar and you can earn Candy with your Buddy Pokemon by walking with them.  Not only does it add a new element of game play but it brings a bit more personalization as you can have your favorite Pokemon as part of your avatar in the game.

If you are a Pokemon Go player, congratulations!  You and the other players of the game have collectively walked the distance from Earth to Pluto.  For those that are curious, that is 4.6 billion kilometers.  The staggering number was released amongst other trinkets of information from Niantic, the developer of the game, as they announced it was coming to the Apple Watch yesterday at Apple’s event and on their blog.

Pokémon GO surpassed 500 million downloads around the world and players have collectively walked 4.6 billion kilometers, which is the distance from Earth to Pluto.

Even if you take out the distanced walked playing the game, the fact that is has 500 million downloads at this point is equally as staggering for a different reason.

Formula One fans have a lot to be excited about these days.  This year’s championship is a bit closer (amongst the Mercedes drivers at least), fat, 70s-style tires are coming next season, there are new owners of the sport and Codemasters is finally making their game available for mobile devices!  F1 2016, the outstanding F1 career and racing game that has been available for consoles, will be coming to iOS and Android later this year as a paid app.  The news came from the Apple event yesterday where the epic racing game will first be coming to iOS and later to Android.  How much later is unclear but it should be this year.

F1 2016 brings you the entire 2016 season, all 21 races, along with all the teams and drivers.  It is officially licensed from Formula One Management (FOM) so this is not a knock-off.  This is the real deal and if it is anything like the console games, it will be a real treat.

Real Racing 3 has been updated once again, bringing with it four new exotic cars for you to take spin in on tracks around the world.  The update is rolling out to the Google Play Store now and you are looking for version 4.4.1 for those keeping score at home.  The update is big at 55MB so you’ll want to download it over Wi-Fi to make your life easier.  Once you have it, you will have access to a new Ferarri and three new Lotus cars in the game.

Last month I posted about a change that is coming to Google Play Games around Gamer IDs and the deprecation of the Google+ linking requirement.  That change is starting to roll out now via some back end changes in the service along with an updated app for Android.   To this point, if you played a game on your Android device and signed into the service, it required you to have a Google+ ID to do so.  It created a multi-step process for users and is a bit of a hold over from when Google tried to push everyone and everything through Google+.  At some point this year, Google is going to eliminate this requirement and gamers will be able to sign in one time per account and any new games they start playing, they will be automatically signed into the service.