Looking for Cute Game Characters? Check Out These Games
Many gamers don’t just play for the gameplay. For them, the graphics and game characters are also important. Some games endear players because of the cute characters and the adorable gaming environment. If you are looking for games that feature cute and charming characters, consider the following options:
(Image courtesy of AKARAKINGDOMS / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)
1. Tiny Monsters
Published by TinyCo, Tiny Monsters is one that can surely fill your desires for adorable characters. This free game offers loads of cuteness as you can expect updates of new monsters every week. Gameplay is simple. You just have to hatch, raise, and reproduce your monsters. You will have to take care of monsters and chase the opportunity to breed rare hybrids. You will definitely appreciate all your monsters’ charms given the game’s high resolution and outstanding animation. Complete your collection of magical monsters while enjoying cuteness overload.
2. Angry Birds
They may be described as angry avian creatures but there’s something about them you are bound to like. Proof to this charm is the popularity of the near-iconic angry bird characters. For a time, Angry Birds became highly popular and would probably rise to a new wave of popularity again after Sony releases the film adaptation of the game. The distinctive design of the characters in Angry Birds make them easily recognizable. They’re supposed to be angry but they don’t convey any unpleasantness at all.
3. Burger Cat
Cats: they make the Internet a cuter place. And they do the same for games! Take Burger Cat for example. This feline has an insatiable appetite and adorable antics that make him all the more irresistible. And look at those dopey eyes! Burger Cat loves to eat cheeseburger – something you’d appreciate if you are one of those who have fallen for characters like Jerry or Stuart Little. Yes, he does not chase mice although he’s indirectly giving them competition through the cheese in the cheeseburger he loves.
4. Pokemon
And of course, who could forget Pokemon when talking about cuteness? There are many Pokemon games on mobile. Many are not affiliated with the real Pokemon creators but if you are just looking for your dose of cute game characters, they should suffice. Admittedly, these charming little monsters look adorable even in their less than HD incarnations. There are many of them so you won’t be running out of options that would suit your idea of what a charming little monster should be.
5. Panda Jump
Nobody can say pandas are not cute. Perhaps, they’re even the best representative for the adjective. Their unmistakable color combination and irresistible plump form make them utterly cute. That’s why if you are looking for cute game characters, Panda Jump is something you will not regret trying. The game is an endless runner type that requires a player to tap to jump and attack. Just like other endless running games, there will be obstacles and challenges. Fortunately, you can make your panda do a shield to block a hit. Panda Jump may not have the best graphics but it is nice enough to complement the cuteness of panda character.
6. Tiny Castle
In this game, you will try to explore an enchanted kingdom with magical creatures. You will have to collect mystical creatures and raise them until they mature and become useful in your quest to beat the Evil Queen in the castle. You can also unlock magical powers and summon hybrid monsters. What’s more, there’s also the option to decorate the game’s setting with various cute items. This is something you shouldn’t miss if you are looking for cute creatures and an exciting gameplay.
7. Terra Monsters
Terra Monsters is another monster game that is about collecting, raising, training, and battling cute monsters. There are 178 monsters in the game and players can develop their own distinct monsters that they can endow with unique traits, including hundreds of moves or skills. The game also features 10 different settings, an exciting story, and mysteries to solve.
Try these games and drown yourself with all the charms of make-believe adorable critters. It doesn’t hurt that all of these games are free and only charge for in-game purchases that you may not really need at all.
Samsung throws money at Ericsson to end smartphone patent war
We prefer it when companies make devices, not courtroom drama, so it’s delightful to see that Samsung has silenced another one of its litigation-frenemies this morning. The company has signed a cross-licensing agreement with former Sony beau Ericsson, with a figure of around $650 million being paid up-front, and an undisclosed regular payment to follow. Now that Samsung has appeased both Google and Ericsson, let’s hope we can get back to reporting on gadgets, or else we may have to rename this place Enlawsuit.
[Original image credit: Wikipedia]
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Samsung
Via: re/code
Source: Ericsson
Kantar: Samsung sales stall in China and Europe despite Android’s overall growth
Thanks to its latest earnings report, we already knew that Samsung’s market share dropped last quarter. But the latest report from analytics outfit Kantar now shows mainly where: the all-important Chinese and European markets. Its figures show that the Korean giant has slipped 2.2 percent in France, the UK, Italy, Spain and Germany over last year while remaining flat in China during the same period. Since overall Android market share increased five percent in China, that means Samsung has lost ground to local companies like Xiaomi, which is now the market share leader in that nation.
Meanwhile, though Apple’s iOS dropped in most markets over last year, it held strong in key markets China, UK and the US, counting up 44 percent of holiday handset sales stateside. Cupertino is also king of Japan with 69 percent of total smartphone share, due in large part to Japan’s largest operator, NTT DoCoMo finally carrying Apple handsets. As for the rest of the pack, Windows Phone has picked up significant market share in every region over last year and is even the number two smartphone OS in Italy. That’s mostly at the expense of Blackberry, which now holds a miniscule 0.4 percent of the US market and has declined precipitously everywhere else — to the point that its not a given that it’ll appear on any charts soon.
Filed under: Cellphones
Via: Techcrunch
Source: Kantar World Panel
10 Important E-commerce Strategies for Post-Holiday Craze
The holiday craze is over, however, clearance sale isn’t. As sellers, we must know how to take advantage of the shoppers’ online habits—they know we’re going to offer marked-down prices and free shipping, but the question is this: is your e-commerce hosting ready to receive tons of traffic?
Spin up those servers and consider the following strategies to optimise your website and promotional campaigns and avoid downtime whilst they shop till they drop:
- Monitor the infrastructure – Keep the online “doors” open and make sure you’re running a high-performance website to ensure the shoppers’ delight whilst browsing through your pages. Team up with your cloud vendor and conduct cloud monitoring to see the condition of your servers and websites.
- Racking up a managed account with e-commerce hosting – Focus on your sales, core operations and promotional campaigns and let the cloud specialists do the work of optimising your cloud infrastructure with a managed cloud account.
- List product deals and freebies – Create lists for your clearance sale for top 10 products, top 20 free shipping items etc. As the brain easily understands numbers more than the spelled words. Be creative in designing the products and strategically position the call-to-action button of “buy now.”
- Share via social media networks – Take advantage of the social media networks and advance your marketing team to contribute in sharing your website links, landing pages and shopping deals. Keep on sharing and building momentum during the first weeks of January until product supplies last.
- Position your social media buttons visibly – Shopbop, an online fashion retailer, positioned the popular social media buttons per product description where shoppers can easily share the images via Facebook, Sina Weibo, Pinterest and Email.
- Send newsletters as reminders – Massive promotions through newsletters are helpful. Select all the items you wish to feature on the newsletter and apply the psychology principles to stimulate their interests, desire and urgency. Your goal is to lead them to your website and buy the items.
- Guarantee 24/7 customer service – eBay Hong Kong positioned its customer service support on their home page to let the shoppers know that they have a support team to assist them.
- Offer free international shipping – Most shoppers would always calculate the shipping costs. Despite the post-holiday craze and the clearance sale, be generous in offering international shipping if possible. You can even offer extra codes for promos and reduce the charge for bulk items.
- Live chat box – Serve your shoppers well by integrating a live chat box on your website. You can’t avoid their queries and questions; although some of them can wait. A minute delay of any online transaction can cost you hundreds of dollars. Make sure that the apps and services hosted in the cloud are able to keep up with these because these are highly critical.
10. Give additional discounts through promo codes
Is the Nexus Line Ending in 2015?
Eldar Murtazin is one of those guys that seems to have a knack in finding out information before everyone else. We would say he has about a 70 to 80 percent rating for being spot on, and now he has dropped a doozy about our precious Nexus phones.
Nexus line by Google is over in 2015 
Yes – this line will be replaced by Play Edition (current name, it will be rebranded)
— Eldar Murtazin (@eldarmurtazin) January 27, 2014
Murtazin just tweeted that information out, and I quickly straightened up and belted out, “WHAT?!” before my fingers started typing out this post. To me it seems like a pretty good idea, as well as true.
When Google started this Google Play Edition line, a lot of us thought they were being extremely kind by throwing on stock Android on our more popular devices, without us having to suffer through the task of rooting those devices. But then Google started throwing curveballs at us, when they announced Google Play Editions of random devices, like the LG G Pad 8.3, Sony Z Ultra, and the Moto G. Maybe this is a preview of things to come?
Then we have the Moto X. Some of us speculated that the Moto X line would maybe phase out the Nexus line, but having the Google Play Edition line sounds a little more intelligent, and it will allow the manufactures battle it out for best Google Play device. That’s just what we are thinking over here, but let us know what you guys think about this. True? Or complete BS?
Source: Twitter
LG shrinks losses thanks to strong TV sales, promises new flagship phone next month
LG doubled its profits in the last year — and it’s thanking an apparent boom in HDTV sales, not its mobile wares. From October – December 2013, the company made an operating profit of $220 million (238 billion won), more than doubling the operating profit from its TV range, but saw a net loss for the quarter of $59 million (64 billion won). Meanwhile, mobile (including both smartphones and the company’s return to tablets) went from profit maker to loss maker in the space of a year, with an operating loss in Q4 2013 of $40 million (43 billion won). That operating loss has been partly blamed on marketing spending, with LG advertising more aggressively for flagship phones like the LG G2 and the G Flex in the last 12 months. LG’s quarterly smartphone unit sales totaled 13.2 million units: more than a 50 percent increase from the same period last year.
The company has also announced that it’ll have a new G Pro model, the G Pro 2, to add to the flagship in February — presumably ready for when MWC 2014 kicks off in Barcelona — although it’s not specifying, well, anything about the new smartphone yet. LG also expects 2014 to be the year of OLED (although not flexible ones ), with the nascent screen tech becoming its “main growth driver” in TV and replacing LED sets in the process.
Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, HD, Mobile, LG
Via: Reuters
Source: LG Social (Korean), LG
Weekly Roundup: PlayStation Vita TV review, T-Mo’s ‘Mobile Money’ and more!
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The future of Nokia featurephones
Engadget’s Brad Molen discusses Microsoft’s impending acquisition of Nokia and how the deal might change the future of the manufacturer’s once-mighty featurephone linup. Follow the link for more information.
PlayStation Vita TV review
Sony’s PS Vita TV media streamer is cute, quiet and about the size of a deck of cards. You can even pair it with a PS3 DualShock controller and viola, you’ve got games. But would your $96 be better spent on a more portable PS Vita? Click the link for our review and find out.
T-Mo’s ‘Mobile Money’
T-Mobile’s latest endeavor is a personal finance product called “Mobile Money” that combines a smartphone app and branded prepaid Visa card. Best of all: you don’t even have to be a customer to sign up for it. Click on through for details. Click on through for details.
Uber-rare NES game lands on eBay
Back in the 1990′s, the Nintendo World Championship toured the US with 116 custom game cartridges containing special levels from Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer and Tetris. If owning a gem like that makes you flutter on the inside, now might be your chance! Click the link for details.
Filed under: Misc
Moog’s Theremini suits all skill levels with adjustable scale correction for its space-controlled tunes
Sure, Moog is known to many for cranking out stellar analog synthesizers, but the outfit also has a knack for building a stable of Etherwave Theremins. In fact, founder Bob Moog started tinkering with the space-controlled instruments back in 1954. If you’re a bit unfamiliar with the devices, theremins use two metal rods to control pitch (vertical) and volume (horizontal) based on the proximity of the user’s hands to each end, without ever touching the unit. At NAMM 2014, the North Carolina-based company unveiled a prototype of the Theremini: a $319 offering that has assertive pitch control built in for all skill levels. This feature allows you to dial up or down the scale correction, making it impossible to play a wrong note in when it’s turned up to the max. For more advanced users, turning that dial all the way down offers no assistance. There’s also a tuner for visual feedback of each note, displaying how it stacks up to the perfect spot.
Inside, an analog heterodyning oscillator is paired with Moog’s Animoog engine and built-in stereo delay for creating the range of tones. On-board presets allow you to choose from a library of patches, store scales, set ranges and create patch-specific delay settings. To enable playing just about anywhere, a speaker is tucked inside the Theremini with headphone jack and audio outputs alongside connections for pitch, gesture and MIDI control. Unfortunately, there’s no word on when the device will ship, but if you’re in a hurry to grab a theremin now, there’s always the DIY route.
Filed under: Misc
Source: Moog
Stratasys’ new 3D printer creates multicolored flexible materials
Stratasys‘ has a new $330,000 3D printer, but this one has the potential to do a whole lot more than monochrome figurines. In fact, the company says it’s the first machine able to create objects in colored, flexible materials. The Objet500 Connex3 3D printer uses rubber and plastic as base materials, although according to Stratasys (the company which now owns the MakerBot series) material combinations will be able to offer different levels of rigidity, transparency and opacity. Colors, meanwhile, are produced by the same mix of cyan, magenta and yellow you’ll find on your inkjet printer at home — it even comes with six palettes of rubbery “tango” colors, if you’re perhaps looking to channel your ’90s tastes into some tasteful flexible booties, as seen above.
At the technical level, the printer can go as fine as 16-micron layers, offering a high level of detail and finish, and can pump out around 30kg of resin (that is, base material) per run. Talking to the BBC, a Stratasys spokesperson said the advanced printer could cut down industrial design prototyping times by 50 percent, although he was talking about the time from prototype to market, not printing time itself. The Objet500 Connex3 launches today, although those flexible color printing materials won’t be available to buy until Q2 later this year, so hold on to those neo-boot dreams for now.
Switched On: The next steps for digital wellness, part one
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.
Some of today’s leading wearable devices are, at their core, little more than souped-up pedometers. Their once-dim monochrome LCD screens have migrated from atoms to bits that connect to the internet, allowing them to display information in a more engaging way and track it over time. They have been a big win for output, but with essentially the same input.
Indiegogo in particular has been a fertile launchpad for alternative wearables for the fitness enthusiast. One has been the Push band, which measures things such as force, power and velocity for activities like weightlifting. And the impact of that might be measured by the Skulpt Aim, which tracks muscle health. Another alternative to run monitors in development is the Atlas, which includes a digital footprint of 30 different exercises for more intelligent exercise analysis.
But even the most sophisticated and accurate exercise monitoring provides insight into a very small picture of our overall wellness. To provide greater insight into our quantified health, far more needs to be considered.
Nutrition
For the common problem of obesity, changing eating habits is likely to have a bigger payoff than the daily difference of a few thousand steps. And while there are many apps that allow people to input their food manually or even take photos of it, that is almost the equivalent of having us manually count the number of steps we take in a day.
Some of the earliest efforts in this space have come from the HAPIfork. It measures the speed and frequency with which one shovels food into one’s mouth, but it can’t distinguish between lettuce and butter-infused mashed potatoes. Then there’s TellSpec, a spectrometer that offers to analyze the nutrient and allergen content of your food. Given, that’s an order taller than a stack of Big Macs, and it’s been met with a large dose of skepticism.
Stress
Stress, and how one deals with it, can be a key factor in determining one’s level of wellness. It’s easy to detect the signs of stress such as a faster heartbeat, and many gadgets like the Basis watch can measure that. What’s more difficult is determining stress itself. Perhaps some guesses could be made about factors such as noise levels, late hours and scheduling. Companies such as Helicor, with its StressEraser, and HeartMath have developed biofeedback devices to help with relaxation and stress reduction; the latter has released a version that connects to iPhones via cable.
Environment
At CES, a couple of companies showed off app-connected air quality monitors. These included the centralized Alima air quality monitor and the tiny, distributed CubeSensors that won the TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield competition. Both do for indoor air quality what The Weather Channel reports on in terms of outdoor air quality.
The next Switched On will discuss some of the less volatile factors that have an impact on our health and wrap up with some thoughts on how we all might benefit if we can find a way for them to come together intelligently.
Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, a research and advisory firm focusing on consumer technology adoption. He shares commentary at Techspressive and on Twitter at @rossrubin.
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